A NEW 
CITIZENSHIP 



Democracy Systematized 
For Moral and Civic Training 



by 
WILSON L. GILL, LL.B, 

President of the American Patriotic League 

Formerly General Supervisor of Moral and Civic Training 

In Cuba for the United States War Department and 

Supervisor at Large of Indian Schools for the 

United States Department of the Interior 



INTRODUCTION BY 

PATTERSON DU BOIS 
Author of "Point of Contact," "The Culture of Justice," etc. 



AMERICAN PATRIOTIC LEAGUE 

INDEPENDENCE HALL 

PHILADELPHIA 



a? 






Copyright, 1913, by 
WILSON L. GILL 



By the same Author 
"The Boys' and Girls' Republic" 
Civic Practices for Boys and Girls" 
"Civic Problems," Etc. 



DEC 27 1913 



MONOTVPED BY 

ANTHONY PRINTING COMPANY 

HANOVER. PA. 



©:i.A361351 



DEDICATION 

This Book is dedicated to Mary Smith Wa ters Gill, a 
worthy descendent of William Bradford, who for more than 
thirty years was elected annually to steer the ship of state 
of the first political government in the world to adopt the 
Golden Rule as its sailing chart. To her I owe the possi- 
bility of the discovery or invention which this book is to 
explain, by which the principles of democracy which guided 
the Pilgrims is systematized for moral and civic educational 
purposes, for from my babyhood, she, my mother, taught me 
to follow this principle in all affairs, and till her ninety- 
second year gave me encouragement and counsel, and 
financial assistance when needed, in every undertaking for 
private and for the public welfare. 



INTRODUCTION 

The world waits long for the discovery of 
the obvious. It waited until the seventeenth 
century for Comenius to set a definite value 
on doing as a means of learning to do, but 
not until Froebel, in the nineteenth, formu- 
lated and applied in practice the law of 
creative self-activity, or learning by doing, did 
education, as both science and art, come into 
its own. When this law is applied in certain 
forms of training it goes by the name of the 
"laboratory method' ' and it takes its place 
among the essentials of pedagogy. Mr. Gill 
has made it the very fundament of moral 
training. 

It was just in the morning twilight of the 
twentieth century that the author of this 
notable book sighted the laboratory method as 
a school specific for the cure of much civic 
incompetence and infamy. Horace Mann was 
the great apostle of our free or common 
school system, but it remained for Mr. Gill 
to use the public school as a preparatory mode 
of citizenship and a practice-ground of social 
morals. 

7 



8 A New Citizenship 

The story of his first methodized appli- 
cation of the principle in a New York school 
of East Side immigrant children and its 
startling result is followed convincingly by 
the account of later official successes in the 
schools of Cuba and in our own Indian schools 
and elsewhere even on other continents. 

It seems superfluous to formally "introduce' ' 
any one who has been for a life time, as has 
Mr. Gill, in close touch with many persons 
of distinction in varied business and pro- 
fessional interests. Yet this book is meant 
t o acquaint a still larger public with the fact 
that our boys and girls can be led to grow 
into their civic and moral responsibilities as 
citizens through actual practice in the schools. 

This is no idle dream; it is an ideal that 
has been abundantly demonstrated as within 
easy realization when it has the sanction and 
support of legislation. 

All of Mr. Gill's early education and train- 
ing, together with his subsequent experiences 
as a lawyer and as a civil and mechanical 
engineer engaged as the leader in large and 
important enterprises, appears to have fo- 
cussed ultimately on moral-civic training. 
It is one of those cases of the convergence 



Introduction 9 

of many interests to one that are fundamental 
to all progress. 

The whole recital or argument is projected 
upon our common historical background, and 
is vividly true to every intelligent conscience. 
It proceeds by gradual progression from theory 
to practice and from practice as prescription 
to the collect of specimen incidents, narra- 
tives, or anecdotes from school life — pictures 
of boys and girls undergoing magic moral 
transformations under the compelling power 
of realized personal responsibility. 

Although Mr. Gill has wrought his system 
out to a nicety of detail (much of which 
appears in his new manuals) it is quite 
elastic. It has proved to be acceptable in 
monarchies as well as in a republic or demo- 
cracy. There will be a difference of opinion 
on questions of age adaptations and of other 
details at one point or another, but the 
essential principle and general plan of the 
attainment of an end appear to be really 
vital to a national and municipal life that 
would hope to endure as "government of the 
people, by the people, and for the people/ ' 

Patterson Du Bois. 



PREFACE. 

We are expected, when we reach the voting 
age, to take our part in the community as 
responsible, independent citizens, always ready 
to take the initiative and to do team work 
for the public welfare. But we do not know 
how and can not do it, for at home, at school 
and at college we have been trained as irre- 
sponsible subjects of a monarchy, rather than 
responsbile citizens of a republic, and our 
irresponsibility in reference to government 
has been crystalized into habits before we 
reach the age of twenty-one. 

Our wits are sharpened on mathematics; 
we are taught to express our thoughts in 
correct language; we learn team work when 
we play ball. All of these are tools of citi- 
zenship, but they are equally the tools of 
boss rule and of graft. 

Is it not evident that if we are to be fitted 
to live the lives of persons who will habitually 
defend their own and the people's rights and 
will gain every good for themselves individ- 
ually and for the whole people, that all the 

11 



12 A New Citizenship 

training which is given in the schools against 
such results or is only neutral, shall be made 
positive for the good results which we desire? 

The School Republic is a method by which 
the oldest students in a university and the 
youngest children in the kindergarten may be 
trained positively to develop independence 
and every other feature of character that is 
necessary for the highest personal and com- 
munity welfare. It furnishes the spirit and 
the practice of citizenship and suggests forms 
of organization, such as those of village, 
town, county, city, state and federal govern- 
ment, which are elastic and may be adapted 
to the circumstances of any school, club or 
association of young or older people, where 
there is some chance of instruction and prac- 
tice in citizenship. It is not in competition 
but in co-operation with the academic teaching 
of morals, manners and citizenship, the Boy 
Scouts, Campfire Girls, the Red Cross, the 
American Institute of Child Life, the George 
Junior Republic, etc. 

As perfect citizenship must necessarily be 
founded upon justice and the spirit expressed 
in the Golden Rule, the use of a method that 
will tend toward such citizenship, in the 



Preface 13 

public schools of all countries, will just as 
certainly tend toward international peace and 
co-operation, rather than competition, of all 
nations for the prosperity and happiness of 
the whole human race. 

The object of this book is to show how these 
thoughts have been developed and success- 
fully applied and how the work which has 
already become both national and interna- 
tional may be further developed. To this 
end I ask the co-operation of every man and 
woman, boy and girl in our own and every 
land. 

Wilson L. Gill. 

Mt. Airy, Pa., 'December, 1913. 



CONTENTS 

chapter i 
The Historic Situation 17 

chapter ii 
The Problem Stated 32 

chapter iii 
The Problem Solved 46 

chapter iv 
The Method Systematized 53 

chapter v 
General Supervision Necessary 67 

chapter vi 
Elements Old and New 76 

chapter vii 
Objections and Misconceptions 91 

chapter viii 
Experiences and Conclusions 105 

chapter ix 
A Long Chapter of Short Stories ... 117 

chapter x 
Appeal to Citizens and Legislators . . 171 

chapter XI 
General Summary 178 

Appendix 193 




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CHAPTER I 

The Historic Situation 
Religious-moral, Civic, Legal 

IN this day of great moral-political unrest, 
a day fluttering more or less confused- 
ly with a spirit of reform and reconstruc- 
tion, a day of investigation, experiment and 
challenge, much good has been accomplished, 
yet the very foundation of a permanent de- 
mocracy remains unlaid. It is not even recog- 
nized that there must be such a foundation, 
and of course the necessary elements of it 
have not had a thought from the people as 
a whole, nor from educators in general, 
much less from our legislators. 

Notwithstanding this is an age when child- 
nature is being studied as never before, 
when educators have theoretically proclaim- 
ed the child himself, rather than the subject 
of study, as the center, and have recognized 
the great fundamental Froebelian principle of 
"learning by doing," it seems extraordinary 

17 



18 A New Citizenship 

that all this fighting for economic and politi- 
cal reform is based on the adult, while the 
child, whom the age is wordily emphasizing, 
remains virtually forgotten as the solution 
of much of our civic trouble. 

It is the function of this book to show that 
what we chiefly need to do, in order to es- 
tablish a permanent democracy is to apply 
the acknowledged principle of beginning at 
the beginning, to begin with doing, rather 
than with the mere memorizing of text books. 

Is this a dream, a theory only? By no 
means. Already this only possible solution 
of a large part of the moral-political problem 
before us has been demonstrated in no slight 
way, and the purpose of this book is to give 
larger currency to the solution and its proofs, 
in order that public opinion may force the 
more rapid enactment of the principle into 
law, and may universalize its adoption by 
states and nations. 

But let us see what our present position is, 
and how history has brought us to the in- 
viting threshold of an era of new political 
morality, which makes its attainment easy, 
and so increases our responsibility to take 
advantage of the situation. 



The Historic Situation 19 

Let us consider this from the strictly moral 
standpoint and then from the political. 

All agree that the Master Teacher taught 
the correct doctrine of business and social 
life — industry, cleanliness, good health, jus- 
tice, kindness, toleration, consideration, and 
love for all mankind. The pagan nations of 
Europe grafted it on their barbarism, and 
called themselves Christians. Through the 
centuries, this leaven has modified, to some 
extent, the cruelty, filth, disease, selfishness, 
competition, and wars of barbarism. 

The slow progress of getting all the good 
that can be gotten from preaching and other 
means of propaganda has gone on through 
the Christian era. Adults who had heard 
the truth and endeavored to put it into prac- 
tice, in spite of their established habits and 
character, and only partial understanding of 
the doctrine, gave what they could to their 
children. Thus the barbarism which has come 
down to us, and is prevalent in Christian 
countries, is modified and in many cases is 
so glossed over with the appearance of good 
that we are apt to think it is genuine Chris- 
tianity. 

We have many and convincing evidences 



20 A New Citizenship 

that the world is vastly better than in former 
times. One of the most significant of all in 
our own country is the fact that within our 
own personal memory the average length of 
human life has increased not far from twenty 
per cent. In international affairs there is a 
certain fact, which speaks for a higher civili- 
zation, in which we have great reason to 
rejoice. It is that our government furnished 
the funds with which the modern public 
school systems of Japan and China were 
established. These funds had been paid to 
our country, as other funds were at the same 
time paid to other countries, on account of 
damages connected with an armed inter- 
vention in Japan, and the Boxer uprising in 
China. 

Wealth in great profusion is being given to 
aid in stamping out ignorance, filth, disease 
and injustice. The nations are awakening 
to the fact that they have been unfair to 
their women and children, and have made a 
good beginning toward according them means 
of self-defense and of developing their natural 
powers. 

These are but tokens of the happy times 
already arriving. On the other hand, after 



The Historic Situation 21 

nineteen centuries of such experience, evange- 
lists go from city to city in our own United 
States telling of the Christian doctrine to 
great crowds of men and women, and getting 
converts to it, just as if our millions had never 
heard of Christianity. 

As to Christianity in business affairs, an 
officer in a Protestant church, a successful 
retail and wholesale grocer, said, "It would 
be utterly impossible to succeed in my busi- 
ness, under existing conditions of trade, were 
I to follow the Golden Rule. I wish I could, 
but the fact is we have not reached the mil- 
lenium, and competition, not co-operation, 
is the rule of business." Among the different 
sects of Christians throughout the world, 
there is not only rivalry and competition, but 
actual fear and hatred. 

Christian nations find it necessary to main- 
tain great armies and navies, to protect 
themselves from one another, and Japan, 
a Buddhist nation, with some ideals much like 
those of Christianity, must in the same way 
protect herself from the Christian nations. 
At the same time, poor China, without such 
means of protection, has had important parts 
of her territory taken from her by force, and 



22 A New Citizenship 

seems in danger of being completely torn to 
pieces and distributed among the nations 
that have powerful navies, as so much plunder 
in the hands of thieves. 

Let us not lose sight of the fact that we 
have with us great, overflowing, poverty- 
stricken slums, prisons, asylums for idiots, 
insane and other unfortunates, ever increasing 
and crowded, mobs and civil war with strikers 
or anarchists in some parts of our country 
almost perpetually, the horrors of interna- 
tional war from year to year, and the always 
relentless war of competition and failure in 
business. 

All this can be corrected and will be cor- 
rected, but it will be through the children of 
the nations, just as Jesus predicted that it 
would be. In the time of Jesus and through- 
out the Christian era till the present time, 
there has been no means by which an appeal 
could be made to the children throughout the 
world as a factor in the world's great affairs. 
Now, however,we have not only the means but 
the method by which this can be accomplished. 

Similar observations in relation to our civic 
and social affairs reveal the situation about 
as follows : Liberty, justice, and fraternity in 



The Historic Situation 23 

the old world and in the new were of slow 
growth, but the demand for them increased 
as they were passed down from parents to 
children through the generations. 

Between 1776 and the present time there 
has been a great industrial revolution in our 
country, and with it a radical moral, civic, 
and educational evolution, so silent and 
gradual that few have recognized its character. 
We must understand this before we can deal 
intelligently and effectively with the present 
moral and civic predicament of our country. 

At the time our republic was formed about 
97 per cent, of our people lived on farms and 
3 per cent, in the towns. In other words, 
our nation was one of farmers, that achieved 
independence from monarchy in the 18th 
century and established popular government, 
the influence of which has mitigated tyranny 
in many of the countries of the old world. 

This 3 per cent, has grown to about 55 
per cent, of the entire population and is 
rapidly increasing by immigration from the 
rural districts and largely from the discontent- 
ed people of the old countries. 

The significance of these facts, without 
going into detail, is that the moral, civic, and 



24 A New Citizenship 

industrial conditions which in large measure 
formed the character of our ancestors have 
completely changed, and the educational 
methods have not kept pace with the march 
of events. 

On the farms the children were almost con- 
stantly in contact with their parents. This 
contact developed the moral and civic sinews 
of colonial times and of the first half-century 
of the republic. The activities of the present 
day have to a large extent separated the 
parents, especially the fathers, from their 
wives and children. In the most vigorous 
hours of the child's day he is in school. The 
general adoption of machinery on the farms 
has had an effect in the rural communities 
similar to that caused by the mills and great 
commercial establishments in the cities. 

Thus for more than half a century, school 
contact has been a chief factor in the moral 
and civic development of our educated people. 
And this is one of the results: educated 
people, with only small exception, stay away 
from the primaries and municipal elections 
and avoid jury duty. In a typical city some- 
times less than half of the registered voters 
participate in ordinary local elections. 



The Historic Situation 25 

The following editorial which appeared 
lately in a Boston newspaper states clearly 
one important element of our problem: 

It appears from recent indications that fully 5000 
of the 12,000 qualified voters of Richmond, Va., will 
be in control of the entire political machinery of that 
city this year. The 12,000 qualified voters constitute 
only a third of the males eligible to cast ballots. 
[Less than one man in seven who have the right does 
vote]. Fully 5000 men whose poll taxes were paid 
last spring refused to vote at a primary. The News 
Letter calls this condition of things political immorality, 
and the term is none too strong. An impression has 
existed that lax citizenship is more prevalent in the 
large cities of the North than elsewhere in the coun- 
try. The situation revealed in Richmond by one of 
its leading newspapers shows that the South is by no 
means immune to a form of civic indifference that is 
menacing democratic government, national and state 
as well as municipal. 

The public offices of Richmond, we are informed in 
this connection, have for years been filled by persons 
elected by the votes of not the representative citizens 
of the community but the class of electors least de- 
sirous of giving the municipality good government. 
Self-interest compels these to pay their poll taxes, to 
qualify as voters, and to vote. Those engaged in 
ordinary business and professional pursuits take no 
trouble to do any of these things, as a rule. They are, 
apparently, uninterested in public affairs. They 
seem to regard the exercise of the franchise — the great- 



26 A New Citizenship 

est political privilege that has come to the mass of 
the people — as something beneath them. Most 
appropriate to this situation, indeed, is the term 
political immorality. 

In Utah a new election law imposes a poll tax of $3 
on every voter who neglects his duty at the polls. 
The rule has been to penalize the citizen who does his 
duty by imposing upon him a poll tax of $1. It is 
not possible to say that good citizenship is dependent 
on reward or penalty, but it would seem to be ex- 
pedient for communities making so poor a showing 
as Richmond — and there are many others North 
and South — to drop the poll tax altogether, to make 
voting a process subject to as little inconvenience 
as possible. Right-minded men, it is true, should 
require no incentive to duty, but since lax citizenship 
does exist, and since bad citizenship profits by it, 
righteous citizenship may legitimately abandon mere 
theory and take to the practical in an effort to protect 
itself. The truth of the matter is, the average Amer- 
ican community, North and South, is in much need 
of an aggressive political morality. 

Why do we charge the schools and colleges 
with this condition? We know that they have 
taught civics and the pupils have sung pa- 
triotic songs and have heard learned and even 
enthusiastic lectures on history and citizen- 
ship. This is the charge: They have sub- 
stituted book learning for that industrial, 
moral, and civic training of farm life which was 



The Historic Situation 27 

an offset to the monarchical government by 
the father and mother, while, at the same time, 
they have continued the monarchy with- 
out any adequate mitigation. 

Under these circumstances, the educated 
American has formed the habit of being governed 
without participating in the government By the 
time he has reached the age of twenty-one, 
this has become a confirmed, crystalized, 
and almost unchangeable feature of his 
character. In only a few of our States is 
the time now passing when a conscientious 
citizen leaves his first primary meeting so 
disgusted that he considers it useless to take 
part in local elections. 

There is room for a great deal of thought 
and investigation in this direction, and al- 
most every attempt to probe into the subject 
brings forth new evidence of the truth of the 
above deductions. 

Men who left school before they reached 
the grade in which civics was taught, and 
others who have had no school education, but 
Work in factories and elsewhere under the 
direction of foremen, never having occasion 
to take the initiative in business, always 
attend primaries and local elections, and they 



28 A New Citizenship 

do this also under the direction of foremen or 
the boss's heelers or leaders. Heads of busi- 
ness, professional men, and others who have 
been trained in the higher schools to think 
independently and are accustomed to take 
the initiative in their business too often refuse 
to attend primaries or local elections. Public 
schools and other educational institutions, 
while making the students mentally able to 
be effective citizens, are rendering them habit- 
ually and morally unable, and thus have 
eliminated as a governing force nearly that 
whole part of the population whose intelli- 
gence and faithful civic service is absolutely 
necessary for the preservation of the spirit 
of freedom and of successful popular govern- 
ment. 

Civic awakenings, brought about from time 
to time in the cities, are of great value; but 
as they do not rest upon the fixed habit, 
among the more highly educated part of the 
community who bring them about, of at- 
tending to the ordinary civic duties, the civic 
conditions soon afterward decline; eternal 
vigilance, the price of liberty, is not paid; 
a new monarch arises; and after a series of 
years of robbery and protected vice and op- 



The Historic Situation 29 

pression by the new "boss," a new crusade 
is preached and there is another temporary 
manifestation of virtue. 

Permanent, right civic conditions must rest 
on right civic habits of all the people. Such 
habits, if established at all, must be in the 
character-building, habit-making part of one's 
life, in childhood and early youth. The 
schools have not attended to this, yet they 
are the only extensive, practical means for 
this purpose, and this is the special reason 
for their existence. Any effort spent on this 
preventive, constructive work will produce 
permanent results, whereas no amount spent 
on the symptoms and in counteracting the 
results of bad government can be permanent, 
except in very small degree. 

Summary 

What is the meaning of all this? 

There are of course many elements in the 
full answer to this question, but there are 
three of prime importance, with which the 
people in general, learned men and states- 
men, do not seem to have reckoned. 

The first is a failure to understand that 
right living, which includes citizenship, is an 






30 A New Citizenship 

art, which cannot be learned academically, 
from sermons, lectures, speeches, books, tracts, 
recitations, or songs and prayers, valuable as 
these may be, but must be learned by con- 
stant, actual practice of the art itself; and, 
with but few exceptions, this practice must 
be under the guidance of teachers who are 
in some measure masters of the art. 

The second element is the failure to recog- 
nize, and to act on this understanding, — 
that as a rule, with few exceptions, no art 
can be learned after the plastic time of young 
life is past. 

The third is that the ordinary process of 
changing educational methods is a matter of 
half-centuries and centuries; that the demo- 
cratic method, which ought to have been 
worked out and generally adopted immediate- 
ly after the Revolutionary War, but is only 
now invented and demonstrated, should not 
be left to make its way by the stupid old 
fashion, to general adoption a century hence. 
The national and international need of it 
should be recognized by legislators and pro- 
vided for without further economic, social, 
and political loss. 

This is a brief statement of our present 






The Historic Situation 31 

moral-political situation, not only in the 
United States, but to a greater or less degree 
in every civilized country in the world. 

Let us now look for the remedy more in 
detail. 



CHAPTER II 

The Problem Stated 
A Method of Moral Training 

WE are thus brought face to face with 
a complex problem, but withal, at 
the root it is simply the problem of 
teaching morals. It is now well-nigh univer- 
sally admitted that the making of character 
is the chief end and aim of education. But 
just how ethical teaching or moral training is 
to be best accomplished in the public schools, 
is still a matter of opinion — or no opinion in 
particular. 

Shall this most important branch of in- 
struction depend upon text-books of ethics? 
Shall the teacher be entrusted to point moral 
lessons from the three R's and the humanities? 
These are but academic and inadequate. 
This is a problem to be solved by the labora- 
tory method, and that rests mainly on the 
principle of learning by doing. The general 
form which this laboratory method takes 

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Boy and girl health officers inspecting for cleanliness, 
as citizens enter school. 
Any great improvement in civilization must depend upon better 
habits of the whole people. The habits of a large mass of adults can not 
be changed. Children can be led to form good habits. There has been 
no means for training children in large numbers till the advent of the 
public school system which is now spreading throughout the world and no 
efficient method for this purpose till the invention of the school republic 
which is the laboratory method of moral and civic training. 



The Problem Stated 33 

is the development of the sense of re- 
sponsibility of that citizenship into which the 
pupils are coming through the application to 
their daily child-life, of the methods of gov- 
ernment of which government, as adult citi- 
zens, they are to be a part. It must be kept in 
mind, however, that while this mode of in- 
struction is cast in the forms of citizenship, 
the whole content and result are of that 
broader morality and personal independence 
which is the structure of enduring character 
and necessarily includes citizenship. 

Let us get the elements of the problem be- 
fore us, for generally it is but a short step 
from a fully understood statement of a prob- 
lem to its correct solution. In this case, 
which has been waiting for solution from the 
dawn of civilization to the present time, the 
step is so short that it can be expressed in one 
brief clause of four words — Teach morals by 
Practice. 

Loyola is credited with having expressed 
his conviction that if he had the training of a 
child till he was seven, the character of his 
life would be so established that adverse 
influences could not change it. 

Humboldt is quoted in the following extract 



34 A New Citizenship 

from an editorial in the Philadelphia North 
American : 

"Ina tragic hour of the great German peo- 
ple, when Prussia was doggedly staggering 
up from the earth to which she had been 
crushed by the conquering Napoleon, the 
sovereign called upon a famous philosopher 
to aid him in reorganizing the stricken king- 
dom. 

"It was then that Humboldt said: 'What- 
ever you would put into the state, you must 
first put into the schools.' " 

Goethe wrote: "With a mature generation 
there is never much to be done, neither in 
things material nor spiritual, neither in matters 
of taste nor of character. Be ye wise and begin 
in the schools, and then it will go." 

Froebel showed the fundamental necessity 
of "learning by doing" or of creative self 
activity and of our beginning with very little 
children. How strange it seems that the 
Christian era had to wait more than eight- 
een hundred years for the revelation and 
demonstration of this fact ! 

Washington wrote: "The education of our 
youth in the science of government— in a 
republic, what species of knowledge can be 



The Problem Stated 35 

equally important? What duty is more 
pressing than to patronize a plan for com- 
municating it [the science and art of citizen- 
ship] to those who are to be the future guardi- 
ans of our liberty?" 

Lincoln goes further in the same direction 
in his Gettysburg address, when he proclaims 
it as a fact that it was then, as it is today, a 
question whether any nation, conceived as 
ours, "in liberty and dedicated to the propo- 
sition that all men are created equal, can long 
endure." He called for a new dedication to 
the task then before us. The same task is 
still before us. If the educational part of that 
task had been performed at that time, it 
would have saved to our country millions 
upon millions of dollars and an untold aggre- 
gate of human life and welfare. "Eternal 
vigilance is the price of liberty" and our 
people have not paid the price, but they have 
paid the penalty a thousand times more in 
tribute to boss rule. "It is rather for us to be 
here dedicated to the great task remaining 
before us, that this nation, under God, shall 
have a new birth of freedom, and that gov- 
ernment of the people, by the people and for 
the people shall not perish from the earth." 



36 A New Citizenship 

Probably the most important element of 
that task is to make provision that every 
American child shall have such a moral and 
civic training as will insure his loyalty and 
efficient service in building and defending the 
institutions of true democracy. 

Who can speak with more intimate knowl- 
edge of our universities than our President 
Wilson? Yet see what he has to say in the 
following declaration, not only of their lack of 
democratic spirit, but of their positive influ- 
ence against it. These are his words : 

"The great voice of America does not come from 
the seats of learning. It comes in a murmur from the 
hills and woods and farms and factories and the mills, 
rolling and gaining volume until it comes to us from 
the homes of common men. Do these murmurs echo 
in the corridors of the universities? I have not heard 
them. The universities would make men forget their 
common origins, forget their universal sympathies, 
and join a class — and no class can ever serve America. 
I have dedicated every power there is in me to bring 
the colleges that I have anything to do with to an 
absolutely democratic regeneration in spirit, and I 
shall not be satisfied until America shall know that 
the men in the colleges are saturated with the same 
thought, the same sympathy, that pulses through the 
whole great body politic." 

So much for our colleges and universities, 



The Problem Stated 37 

but what of our common schools that train 
daily in subjection to a government in which 
the governed have no responsibility except 
to subject themselves absolutely to autocracy? 
This monarchy, in a large number of cases, 
possibly the great majority, is a beneficent 
tyranny; but the more beneficent, the more 
civic harm does it do, and the greater damage 
to character, in making the young people 
satisfied with being irresponsible subjects of 
government rather than responsible citizens. 
It tends to reduce them to a state of irrespon- 
sibility that amounts to moral idiocy, so far as 
civic duty is concerned. That this wholesale 
training away from democracy by means of 
our immense public school system, reaching 
practically our entire population, could go on 
from decade to decade through a century, 
without recognition by the people, seems 
incredible. At the same time, how could we 
expect anything else, since we have been 
brought up in the public schools and have 
been taught in them and by our parents, that 
they are the bulwark of our liberty and are all 
right, and to be worshiped, as we do our 
flag or any other fetish? 

Let us now consider the present civic con- 



38 A New Citizenship 

dition and then look at the problem as one to 
be solved by the laboratory method. This 
is the problem of making good, efficient citi- 
zens at the start of life, without waiting for 
later years to undertake the almost impos- 
sible task of reforming irresponsible, flabby, 
unthinking, or positively bad citizens, as 
well as those educated and otherwise good 
men who have been habituated in their homes 
and schools to subjection without participa- 
tion in government. 

A vast new population from the south and 
east of Europe, with no antecedants to pre- 
pare them for successful citizenship in a 
democracy, is with us and is rapidly increas- 
ing. The ward politician and the walking 
delegate have been the only means for training 
them for participation in our public affairs, 
and the results are disastrous to the spirit 
and paractices of true democracy. 

Civic conditions are not what they should 
be. In many, if not in most parts of our 
country, taxes are too high for the benefits 
received and are imposed in unscientific ways. 
As trade in opium has in times past been fos- 
tered in China, so among us is trade fostered 
in liquors, harmful drugs, and vice. Arson is 



The Problem Stated 39 

common. The breeding of idiots and crim- 
inals is practically unchecked. The spirit of 
anarchy is showing itself in nearly every part 
of our country. For many years we have 
scarcely ever been without violent mobs of 
men and women in some part of our country, 
in open rebellion against the laws of the state, 
endangering the very foundations of our 
republic. 

These men and women, who, on slight prov- 
ocation, are ever ready when a leader shows 
himself, to defy the law and even the army, 
have several millions of children. These 
children are getting no more practical train- 
ing in the public schools than their parents 
had, to make them understand the spirit of 
American liberty and institutions, and to 
lead them to accept and defend them. Our 
general government and the separate states 
spend a vast sum of money annually to keep 
an army in readiness to put down anarchy 
and rebellion after overt acts have been com- 
mitted, but nothing to eradicate the steadily 
increasing disease of tens and hundreds of 
thousands of men annually dropping their 
work and enforcing idleness on others who 
wish to work, committing unlawful depreda- 



40 A New Citizenship 

tions, defying the police and military powers 
of the government and causing great losses 
and distress to their own families and the 
entire nation. Powder, balls and bayonets 
are used as a medicine, but they are not 
radical, they do not go to the roots of the 
disease. They check it temporarily at enor- 
mous cost, but the sores soon break out again 
in other spots. It is a disease of moral and 
civic ignorance, and a lack of moral and civic 
training. 

We have a vast army of tramps. One au- 
thority, considered reliable, estimates it to 
be above five hundred thousand. Some of 
these men are college graduates. 

The descendants of the colonists have their 
memories stored with a great variety of in- 
formation, and their wits whetted on mathe- 
matics, but generally, after they have left 
the university, they will not more than once 
or twice attend primary meetings and local 
elections. They are out of reach of the heeler, 
but are eliminated from local politics. They 
are victims and not to blame for this, but the 
system of education to which they have been 
subjected is to blame, or, more exactly, they 
are the blame-worthy ones who are respon- 



The Problem Stated 41 

sible for the curriculum and government of 
the schools and colleges. 

These conditions make "machine govern- 
ment" inevitable. 

It is not intended here to complain of our 
public servants, be they good or bad, nor to 
find fault with our citizens who will not vote, 
nor do we complain of "machine government' ' 
and "bosses." These are but necessary re- 
sults, not causes — they are but symptoms of 
the wrong. The root of the matter is what 
concerns us. Our people are trained in the 
schools and colleges to be the subjects of a 
government in which they have no part except 
to obey. Their habits and character in rela- 
tion to government are by this means estab- 
lished and they are not responsible for it. 
They are, however, responsible for the train- 
ing of the children of the present time. 

Children's time is too much absorbed in aca- 
demic work in the schools, regardless of moral, 
civic and industrial training. School govern- 
ment is monarchical (a continuation of home 
government) and pupils are trained to sub- 
jection without participation in the responsi- 
bilities of government. 

Some social conditions in grammar and 
high schools need to be corrected. 



42 A New Citizenship 

Hazing, a most ungentlemanly and coward- 
ly form of bullying, has not been stamped out 
from our schools and colleges — not even from 
West Point and Annapolis. 

As the great majority of our young people, 
fully 90 per cent, desire decent and right con- 
ditions, and despise bullying and the bully, 
they would make a quick end of hazing, had 
the majority an honorable and efficient means 
for expressing itself. There is such a means, 
and it should be given to them. This is not 
only a means of suppression, but it is con- 
structive, by means of a permanent social 
service commission of the young people's 
own democratic government, that sees that 
every new pupil or student is protected from 
every discourtesy and that all is done that 
can be done to enlist every pupil to contribute 
his whole share of effort for the welfare and 
happiness of all the rest. 

For many years, time and energy were 
wasted because of the false theory that chem- 
istry could be taught academically, by means 
of text books, lectures, and illustrative ex- 
periments made by the teacher. Now stu- 
dents learn chemistry while working with 
chemicals in a laboratory. Even at the present 



• 



The Problem Stated 43 

time, school boards and the faculties of 
colleges and universities have failed to awake 
to the fact that citizenship cannot be taught 
academically any more than chemistry can. 

Text book civics without the practice of 
real, unfeigned, responsible citizenship, is 
worse than useless, as it serves to blind those 
who are interested in the matter to the astound- 
ing fact that for 90 and possibly 99 per cent, 
of all students, our educational institutions 
are doing absolutely nothing that will ever 
contribute to the cause of citizenship or the 
defense of our American institutions in time 
of peace. That this charge of neglect can 
be justly made is bad — it is exceedingly bad — 
but what is immensely worse is the fact that 
our schools and colleges in general, with 
criminal ignorance or indifference, train posi- 
tively and definitely away from responsible 
citizenship. The educational institutions ac- 
tually fasten on individuals the habit and 
character of subjection to government for 
which they have no responsibility and in 
which they have no part except to obey or to 
act as spies and informers. 

I wish to repeat, and to impress the fact, 
that students have had no part in their own 



44 A New Citizenship 

government except to obey, and, as a conse- 
quence of this, educated men, with compara- 
tively few exceptions, will not perform their 
most simple and important local civic duties, 
such as attending primary elections and serv- 
ing on juries. Because of this, democracy in 
America is not so great a success as it ought 
to be, and such failure of "government for 
the people and by the people* ' as has been 
illustrated in recent years by the political 
scandals in many of our cities is altogether 
too common. 

Without disparagement to the good inten- 
tions or good character of a majority of our 
teachers of both sexes, it is not to be ex- 
pected that with all their class-room difficul- 
ties (generally no provision for it in the curric- 
ulum) and with an inadequate method or no 
method at all, they shall be competent or 
entirely ready to become trainers of the young 
of all social grades, in morality or even in 
good citizenship. There is this further diffi- 
culty in the way: they themselves have had 
no systematic practical training in this direc- 
tion. But it is possible, as has been abundant- 
ly proved in practice, to put into their hands 
an instrument or a method which goes very 



The Problem Stated 45 

far toward rectifying these difficulties. What 
the nature of this instrument is will appear 
as we proceed. 

Our nation's safety and welfare demand the 
correction of these evils. Thus has been made 
the statement of our problem and the solu- 
tion of it may be epitomized in the following 
words: Train children in the PRACTICE of 
morality. 

How this can be done, and has been done, 
is told in the next chapter. 



CHAPTER III 

The Probldm Solved 

The Laboratory Method of Teaching Morality 

Invented 

MOST of the elements of the School Re- 
public method of moral and civic 
training were recognized at and be- 
fore the beginning of the Christian era. Some 
of these have been used, one element here and 
another there, in schools in the last half- 
century. My part has been to bring together 
these elements, scattered through the ages, 
and make a practical, scientific, efficient work- 
ing plan, by which all ordinary schools for 
children may be made reasonably efficient for 
the purpose for which they exist. At this 
point it may be well to consider for what 
the schools do really exist. 

It would seem to be quite obvious that the 
purpose of the schools is to help each individ- 
ual child to live healthfully and happily and 
to so develop his own physical, mental, and 

46 



The Problem Solved 47 

moral self as to enable him to live, not only 
in the future, but in the present, the most 
efficient life for his own welfare and happi- 
ness and that of all persons, however remote, 
who may be affected in any way by the kind 
of a life he leads. That is, he must learn to 
be considerate of his own and others' rights 
and happiness, and acquire the habit of pro- 
tecting them lawfully; he must be clean and 
healthy in every respect; he must, as far as 
practicable, be self-supporting and independ- 
ent; he must contribute his share to the 
general welfare. In brief, the true object of 
the schools is to teach each individual to live 
right, and the only efficient way to teach this 
is by having the child live as nearly as possible 
as it is needful that he shall live when the 
schooling is past. 

Is this the motive and practice of our schools? 
Far from it. The motive and practice of 
the high schools have usually been to prepare 
not for life, but to enter college ; of a grammar 
school, to get into the high school; of a pri- 
mary school, to get into the grammar school. 
Much has been said and published in regard 
to this condition, many manual training 
schools have been established, and cooking, 



48 A New Citizenship 

drawing and sewing are taught in many schools, 
but for the most part, and even in the manual 
training schools, the old spirit of academic 
grind under despotic masters still remains. 

This old way must and will give way to 
the new and better — but when? In twenty- 
five, fifty, or a hundred years? It is your 
business and mine to bring the old way to 
an end at the earliest possible hour, for it is 
inefficient, wasteful of time, energy, and money, 
and destructive of health, character, independ- 
ence and democracy. 

How can this be accomplished? I have 
worked long on this problem. The greater 
part of the work was in the process which led 
to a realization of what the problem really is, 
and of getting it stated. Then the solution 
was easily seen. The correctness of the solu- 
tion has been proved by an extensive appli- 
cation of the system which is the result of 
the solution. This will be explained quite 
fully, but as the explanation will be better 
understood by a knowledge of the circum- 
stances which led up to the final solution, 
they are here related in brief. 

For a number of years, I was general 
manager of a large railroad car and car-wheel 



The Problem Solved 49 

manufacturing establishment at Columbus, 
Ohio. I improved my opportunity to so 
systematize the work of a number of laboring 
boys, that in the course of from three to four 
years after entering the establishment any 
honest, industrious, and ambitious boy would 
have a trade and be both earning and receiv- 
ing the pay of a journeyman. The good 
accomplished was so great that it led me to 
endeavor to get industrial training grafted on 
the public school system. This project was 
defeated at the polls by the vote of ignorant 
men, under the direction of ward heelers. 

That the men whose families would be 
the chief beneficiaries of such a work in the 
schools should defeat the movement was a sore 
disappointment. Hoping to produce an organ- 
ized force available for use in any such case 
to help bring the public schools abreast of 
the times in spite of such ignorant opposition, 
I helped to organize the national societies 
of the Sons and of the Daughters of the 
American Revolution, and it fell to my lot 
to write the original constitutions for both 
societies, though Major General Alexander 
S. Webb and Judge William H. Arnoux 
were also members of the committee on consti- 
tution of the former society. 



50 A New Citizenship 

Before many months had passed, however, 
I recognized the truth of Judge William H. 
Arnoux's remark that it would be impossible 
to accomplish such an educational purpose by 
means of any society founded on such a basis 
of membership as were these societies. How- 
ever, both of these societies have shown some 
interest in present patriotic duty beyond 
erecting monuments to the past and glorying 
in the fact that the members are related to 
persons who cared nothing for monuments 
but everything for the welfare of mankind. 
Because of this, we may have some reason to 
hope that some day, these great societies may 
do still more service for the living present. 

Following Judge Arnoux's suggestion, I 
asked a number of men and women to join 
me in organizing a society for immediate 
service in solving some social and civic prob- 
lems which have arisen in our country be- 
cause of the failure of our schools and colleges 
to keep up with the rapidly changing indus- 
trial, social, and civic conditions. The result 
of this endeavor was the organizing of the 
American Patriotic League, which was char- 
tered under the laws of Congress in 1891. 
For list of officers and advisors, see Appendix. 

We organized a large number of chapters 



The Problem Solved 51 

for civic study, and wrote and published the 
lessons in citizenship for their use. These 
chapters were composed of men and women, 
many of them in connection with patriotic 
and social societies and with churches, and 
some of them of enlisted men in the army and 
navy. There were also chapters of children. 
The latter were generally in connection with 
public schools and Sunday-schools and grew 
in numbers with great rapidity. 

This work was all academic, but it furnished 
the circumstances which led to the laboratory 
method of teaching citizenship, that is, of 
having the individual assume the responsi- 
bility of making or helping to make the con- 
ditions around him right, as to cleanliness, 
health, honesty, justice, kindness, and inde- 
pendence of character and of keeping them 
right. These circumstances were as follows. 

A teacher in a New York public school was 
president of one of the chapters of young 
people of the American Patriotic League, 
studying citizenship and meeting every Satur- 
day evening, in Amity Chapel's social work 
building. He was sent from a down-town 
school, where all went like clock work, to 
take charge of the discipline in the West 
Farms School, where the pupils were so unruly 



52 A New Citizenship 

that the Police Department, while Col. 
Roosevelt was police commissioner, detailed 
a policeman to be present in the boys' school 
yard at the opening and closing of every 
session and at recess. 

After two weeks' experience at the West 
Farms School, he was somewhat discouraged. 
I told him to try the experiment of showing 
the pupils how to make some laws for them- 
selves, to elect some officers to carry these 
laws into execution, and others to adjudicate 
these laws. He followed my suggestion. It 
worked like a charm. His problem of disci- 
pline was solved. In less than a week there 
was no further need of a policeman at the 
school. I realized that we had made a most 
important discovery from the standpoint of 
pedagogy, of citizenship, and of morality. 
In fact a great part of the one great problem 
of moral and civic training which had been 
waiting through the ages was solved in that 
apparently unimportant experiment. 

Now that the circumstances have been re- 
lated which led up to the solution of this 
problem as a fundamental principle, we may 
proceed to tell how the plan has worked out 
as a system for general use in all schools. 



CHAPTER IV 

The Method Systematized 

THE principle of democracy in school 
having been demonstrated to be val- 
uable and of great importance, the 
next step was to formulate a plan which might 
be practicable for use in all schools. This I 
did, taking for my model an ideal American 
city, in which the three powers of government, 
legislative, executive and judicial, were kept 
reasonably separate. At the same time I 
published several other plans, based on village, 
town, county, state, and federal government. 
The next thing was to "try out" one of 
these plans. By great good fortune, the 
opportunity came immediately. Mr. R. Ful- 
ton Cutting, a member of the advisory board 
of the American Patriotic League, was presi- 
dent of the Society for Improving the Con- 
dition of the Poor, that was maintaining the 
New York City vacation schools. He per- 
mitted me to test the plan in one of these 

53 



54 A New Citizenship 

schools. There were eleven hundred children 
between five and fifteen years of age, all born 
in the southeastern part of Europe, most of 
them regufees from the massacres of several 
preceding years. 

The city form of government seemed best 
suited for this test, so we set up a little re- 
public within the school and called it the 
school city. But as we use other forms, 
sometimes several in one school, we call the 
method the School Republic. 

Mr. William L. Strong, then mayor of New 
York City and president of the Alpha Chap- 
ter of our League, of which ex-mayor Abram 
S. Hewitt had been president, took an active 
and enthusiastic interest in the experiment. 
Col. George E. Waring, Jr., Commissioner 
of Street Cleaning, a member of our Advisory 
Board, who had organized a large number of 
civic clubs among the children in the slums, 
and had important help from them in clean- 
ing the city and keeping it clean, was most 
enthusiastic. He organized the department 
of cleanliness. Mr. Wilson, president of the 
Board of Health, sent Dr. Alfred L. Beebe to 
organize the board of health in the little re- 
public. 



The Method Systematized 55 

The children were told that a positively 
necessary element of successful citizenship is 
the observing of the Golden Rule, at home, 
on the streets, at play, in the school and every- 
where, and that meant, among other things, 
personal cleanliness, cleanliness of homes, 
streets, and school, of thoughts and language, 
and that this must be the basis of their govern- 
ment and laws. They accepted this doctrine 
eagerly and carried it into execution enthu- 
siastically. 

We gave the pupils a charter which denned 
their rights and duties, told what officers 
they might elect and what other officers might 
be appointed by the mayor, and informed 
them of the duties of the officers, etc. A 
brief form of a charter is given in the appendix- 
Under the charter they elected a mayor; 
president of the council; city council consist- 
ing of boys and girls, one of each from each 
room; three judges, two boys and one girl, 
the last being the presiding judge; sheriff; 
attorney; city clerk; clerk of the council, and 
clerk of court. The mayor appointed and 
the council confirmed the appointments of 
commissioners of health, cleanliness, public 
works, and police, and a body of assistants 
for each of these commissioners. 



56 A New Citizenship 

The entire school was the unit of organi- 
zation and each room was a ward or fraction 
of the unit. This form of organization was 
satisfactory in this case and in many others, 
but in the course of time it has become ap- 
parent that teachers understand their re- 
sponsibility better and more easily when we 
consider the school room the unit of organiza- 
tion. Since then, we have organized each school 
room as a village, town, county, or city, and 
a group of school rooms as a state. The form 
of government may be changed from time to 
time, if desired. If the school has but one 
room it may have any one of these forms. 
If the school has several hundred children, 
or has a thousand or more, it is ordinarily 
well to construct several states, so that the 
children of about the same age may have a 
state of their own. 

If the school is a boarding school, in which 
the pupils live in several dormitories, it has 
been found convenient to organize the whole 
school as a federal government; each dormi- 
tory building as a state and in some cases 
two or three states; the academic school 
house as a federal district, approximately paral- 
lel with the District of Columbia, and each 
room in it a city, village, or town. 



The Method Systematized 57 

If each pupil goes from room to room for 
recitations, some other plan of cleavage may- 
be found to divide the whole body of pupils 
into practical groups, each group to be a 
unit of organization. Each separate grade or 
year may be a unit, or there may be groups 
of thirty, forty, or fifty who have their desks, 
each group in a separate room. Always some 
line of cleavage and grouping may be found. 

The results of the vacation school experi- 
ment were so immediate, so evident, and so 
delightful that every person connected with 
it, both children and adults, rejoiced in the 
splendid demonstration. Not only reporters, 
but editors came to see with their own eyes, 
and gave wide publicity to what they saw 
and heard. This publicity extended to every 
civilized country. 

Mr. William T. Stead, editor of the British 
Review of Reviews, wrote it up enthusiasti- 
cally. Dr. Albert Shaw wrote a long article 
of approval for his American Review of Re- 
views. Mr. Daniel T. Pierce's editorial in 
Public Opinion was reproduced in full in 
several hundred newspapers, and McClure's 
Syndicate article by Mr. Cromwell Child 
appeared, well illustrated, in some Sunday 
paper in every large city. 



58 A New Citizenship 

Hundreds if not thousands of teachers 
attempted to use the method. Those suc- 
ceeded who understood the very simple 
principles involved, (that of the Golden Rule, 
and the character developing force of accept- 
ed responsibility or in other words, of demo- 
cracy), and were deeply interested in the 
children and their work. Large numbers, 
lacking one or both of these elements, failed, 
to the apparent discredit of the method. 

The School Republic is not only a means of 
learning by doing, but also a practical ap- 
plication, in a systematic way, of the principle 
of Christianity to the affairs of the daily life 
of children, and, so far as they can make 
their influence felt, in the daily social and 
civic life of adults. Therefore when a teacher 
says, "It was a failure in my school,' ' he is 
simply saying that he has failed to use the 
small amount of intelligence and interest 
necessary to carry the message of Christianity 
to his pupils, day by day. It has been proved 
by hundreds of teachers that it is quite prac- 
ticable to teach children systematically to be 
personally independent and to make the ap- 
plication of the principles of friendship or 
kindness to their ordinary affairs. Here is a 






The Method Systematized 59 

new phrase: The School Republic, among 
other things, is systematic practice of friend- 
ship. 

The method was used in a number of schools 
in New York City in the following school 
years, and at the present time (1913) a com- 
mittee that has the matter in hand, claims 
there are thirty such schools in the City. 
One of these schools has over 4000 school 
citizens, and the total number is probably 
between sixty and ninety thousand using the 
method and possibly more. 

General Leonard Wood about two years 
later was in command of the Army in the 
eastern part of Cuba. President McKinley 
cabled him to come to Washington. On his 
arrival at the New York Quarantine station, 
he sent me a message, asking me to meet him 
in Washington. I did so and he said, as 
nearly as I can remember his words: "The 
President cabled me to come to Washington. 
I believe it is to make me Military Governor 
of Cuba. If I am right in that supposition, 
there are three problems of special impor- 
tance to be solved. The first is to clean Cuba 
and stamp out yellow fever, and the second 
is to produce a citizenship there different 



60 A New Citizenship 

from the kind that is prevalent in Central 
America, which will keep it clean. In these 
matters our interest is not alone for Cuba, 
but for the people of our Southern States, 
who are threatened every summer with an 
epidemic of yellow fever, imported from 
Havana or other Cuban port. 

"I know how to clean Cuba and clear out 
the yellow fever, and I believe that with the 
process you worked out with the immigrant 
children in New York City you can take care 
of the citizenship question. If the President 
asks me to undertake the work, will you go 
along and look after this part of it?" 

I said I would, and I did, under the title 
of General Supervisor of Moral and Civic 
Training. We organized all of the three 
thousand six hundred public school rooms in 
Cuba and immediately got excellent results. 
See General Wood's letter in Appendix. The 
Cuban government failed to appoint a new 
supervisor of moral and civic training. There- 
upon this work became perfunctory in many 
schools, though, as I understand, in many 
schools the method is used with good spirit and 
efficiency at the present time. 

The value of this system of social and 



The Method Systematized 61 

civic training having been thoroughly demon- 
strated by our Government in Cuba, previous 
to 1903, Porto Rico and the Philippines ought 
to have been given the benefit at once. It 
certainly ought not to be withheld from them 
any longer, for by it most of their moral 
questions and civic difficulties may be solved 
ultimately if not immediately. Moreover, 
they cannot be thoroughly, satisfactorily and 
permanently solved except by the use in the 
public schools of the laboratory method of 
teaching morality and citizenship. 

It may be answered that the children in 
these islands are taught reading, writing, and 
arithmetic, and the men have the right to 
vote and so get practice in citizenship. That 
answer is silly. Reading, writing, and arith- 
metic are no more a preparation for right 
living than for wrong; for honest business 
than for cheating, embezzling and graft; 
for loyalty to one's government than for dis- 
loyalty. As to voting — the persistent voting 
in the United States by those who were never 
trained in their childhood in anything that 
would prepare them for good citizenship and 
a proper use of the suffrage has not been 
negative, but the very positive power with 



62 A New Citizenship 

which bossism in our cities was fostered and 
established. 

I wish to reiterate that our nation, in view 
of the fact that we took possession of Porto 
Rico and the Philippines, and enforced upon 
their people education and reforms, owe it 
to them and the rest of the world that the 
education which we give them shall fit them 
directly and positively for right living and 
good, efficient citizenship. What we have 
been giving them is probably excellent, but 
the most important element of all we have 
ignorantly withheld. 

Many teachers in the Indian schools adopt- 
ed the method successfully, with pupils 
in all grades, but most of these teachers were 
kindergartners and teachers of primary grades. 

In April, 1911, Mr. Valentine, Commis- 
sioner of Indian Affairs, requested me to 
introduce the method into all the Indian 
schools. I accepted his invitation and as 
Supervisor at large of Indian Schools began 
this work. Teachers responded well, and the 
Indian children did likewise, earnestly and 
with much enthusiasm. 

The following year, opposition | [to Mr. 
Valentine's progressive policy forced him to 






The Method Systematized 63 

resigrh As my work was one of the most 
radical of Mr. Valentine's innovations, when 
his power was destroyed, all support was with- 
drawn from me, and of course, I too had to 
give up and wait for a more progressive spirit 
in that branch of the Government. However, 
I made a pretty general survey of the Indian 
reservations and schools, sufficient to con- 
vince me that the Indian problem, both in 
the schools and out of them, could be solved 
by this democratic, laboratory method, in 
conjunction with such practices as are taught 
at Hampton Institute, and not by any other 
process. 

The "laboratory method" has reference to 
teaching by means of aiding and encouraging 
the learner to do those things which he is 
to learn, under instruction by the teacher, 
as a boy learns the carpenter's trade while 
working with the carpenter. The academic 
way, which no one would be foolish enough 
to attempt to use in carpentry or black- 
smithing, would be to have the boy put all 
his time and energy into studying books on 
carpentry or blacksmithing, and reciting to 
the teacher what he had heard and gotten 
from the books and lectures. It is evident 



64 A New Citizenship 

that a practical art cannot be learned in that 
way. Yet, though it is clear that citizenship 
is a practical art, our educational institutions 
have not recognized it, and therefore they 
fail to perform their duty in this important 
respect. 

As in the Indian schools, so in the schools 
of Alaska, individual teachers used the method 
with good results. This cropped out in the 
annual reports of the teachers from year to 
year and was noted by Dr. William Hamilton, 
at the head of the Washington office of the 
Alaska Division of the United States Bureau of 
Education. He brought it to the attention of 
the Commissioner, and in December, 1912, 
Dr. P. P. Claxton, United States Commission- 
er of Education, adopted the method for use 
in all the Government schools in Alaska, and 
in the native communities of adults in which 
the schools are located. His letter of instruc- 
tions to the teachers may be found in the 
Appendix. 

In New York City about thirty-three of 
the public schools are organized as school 
republics, and in many other New York City 
schools individual teachers are using the 
method. The same, to a greater or less de- 



The Method Systematized 65 

gree, is true in the cities throughout the United 
States. 

The method is in use in individual schools 
in many parts of the world and has been 
officially sanctioned in several countries. It 
has been enthusiastically and persistently 
championed by Dr. Nina Hamilton Prings- 
heim in Berlin; Dr. Karl Prodinger in Graz, 
Austria (a student of Dr. Pringsheim); Dr. 
Eiji Makiyama in Japan; Dr. Ernesto Nelson 
in the Argentine Republic; Mr. George M. 
Fowlds in New Zealand; Dr. Johan Hepp in 
Switzerland; Mr. Llewellyn W. Williams in 
Scotland; Mr. J. Randall Peach in Liverpool; 
and evidently by many good friends in France, 
China, and other countries. 

In March, 1908, four special commission- 
ers of education from Europe, South America 
and Japan, without knowledge of one another, 
wrote desiring to confer with me in the City 
of New York in reference to school citizen- 
ship in their countries. I invited them to 
meet, and they did so a number of times. 
On the 3d of April they signed articles of 
agreement founding the Children's Interna- 
tional State, with the view of developing civic 
and moral training in every country and culti- 



66 A New Citizenship 

vating international friendly intercourse and 
co-operation among all public school children 
for every good purpose. This has been suf- 
ficiently tested to demonstrate its practi- 
cability as soon as money shall be furnished 
from any source for clerical and other as- 
sistance. A copy of these articles may be 
found in the Appendix. 



CHAPTER V 

General Supervision Necessary 

SUPERVISION provided for by Con- 
gress and state legislatures is necessary 
for obtaining such instruction in citi- 
zenship as is needed for the welfare of the 
people and the stability of democratic govern- 
ment. 

Following the successful experiment in the 
summer of 1897, the Superintendent of Schools 
of the City of New York prohibited the use of 
the new method. His action was reported the 
same day to the Board of Education, and 
within twenty-four hours he was ordered by 
the Board to give me an open letter to all 
the public school principals in the city, di- 
recting them to render me whatever assist- 
ance they could, and of course he did, and 
he gave me most friendly support. 

I organized immediately in the lower East 
Side several little commonwealths in the 
schools. In the very process it became evi- 

67 



68 A New Citizenship 

dent that if I should go on organizing these 
republics in the New York schools, before 
adequate, authoritative supervision were pro- 
vided, I should greatly damage the cause, 
and I therefore did not continue such organiz- 
ing. No supervision has yet been provided in 
New York, though, for the purpose of demon- 
stration, I have since done some such organiz- 
ing here, and some school republics have been 
organized by others without my presence. In 
the spring of 1913, there were about thirty 
school republics in New York City. 

For sixteen years the Board of Education 
and other school authorities in one of our 
cities have had a constant demonstration in 
their own schools of the success and value of 
this method, from every standpoint, pedagog- 
ical, moral, civic and financial, yet they make 
no move to act upon them, though repeated 
efforts have been made to get them to do so. 
The same (less from one to six years) may be 
said of several other cities. 

After five years' successful use of the 
method in a school in another city, in 1903 and 
1904 I organized thirty-three of its large pub- 
lic schools as republics. For several years 
in these schools, the demonstration of the 



General Supervision Necessary 69 

value of the method was maintained, but 
this city has not even yet awakened to the 
importance of this demonstration. One of 
the superintendents volunteered the infor- 
mation to me in 1911, that the reason the 
superintendents were opposed to the School 
Republic method was that I, the author of it, 
was "in it for the money there is in it." The 
superintendents received salaries from thirty- 
five hundred to ten thousand dollars per 
annum, while I received none, and was de- 
voting my life to the work, at the annual loss 
to me of thousands of dollars. 

Great publicity was given to the initial 
experiment by the press throughout the world, 
and it is probable that thousands of teachers 
were led by this to try similar experiments. 
In large numbers of cases they did not under- 
stand the very simple principles involved 
and they made a failure, not of the thing 
which I had discovered or invented, but of 
their misinterpretation of it. In many instances 
the teachers would see in the newspaper and 
magazine articles, dramatic scenes of police 
arrests, trials, etc., but failed to realize that 
the substance of this democracy was being 
applied with success in various forms of gov- 



70 A New Citizenship 

ernment, such as town, county and state 
government, and that the efficacy was not in 
the punishments at all, nor in the form, but 
in the spirit. Where the spirit was right, 
any form, simple or complex — provided it 
was essentially right from a civic standpoint — 
would answer the purpose. The teacher, 
however, must understand that it is a method 
for his use, not simply a machine for the 
pupils, and that success or failure will follow, 
as in all other school work, according to the 
intelligence and enthusiasm with which the 
method is used. 

With these facts before us, the necessity 
for intelligent and authoritative supervision 
ought to be self-evident. 

There are some successful youths' com- 
monwealths in every state of our Union, and 
in many countries, but all of them would 
have a still larger measure of success, could 
they have the benefit of being inspected and 
helped in their weaker spots, by reason of the 
experience of those using the method else- 
where. For instance, many schools that 
have the eight grades will be using the method 
successfully in the seventh and eighth grades 
only, the teachers not realizing that it can be 



General Supervision Necessary 71 

used in all the other grades to as good, and 
possibly better advantage. 

In a certain school where the officers have 
proven to be thoroughly efficient, the same 
persons have been re-elected year after year. 
In such cases good, efficient government is 
maintained, but the principal object of the 
method is lost — namely, the character-build- 
ing effect of the responsibility of the service 
in office of all the children. This can come 
only through frequent elections and rapid 
rotation in office, such as will give every 
child the educational benefit of such election 
and service. 

General inspection and supervision is needed 
to give to all schools the benefit of improve- 
ments and developments wherever they may 
be made, and these help to prevent the forming 
of ruts. That which is today the best known 
application for an eternal truth, because of 
new conditions, may require a different appli- 
cation tomorrow. 

The following illustrates this fact. In 
the first experiment, in 1897, the eleven hun- 
dred children were organized as the citizens 
of a city, with its mayor, judiciary, city coun- 
cil and various administrative boards, bodies 



72 A New Citizenship 

of police and health officers. Each room was 
a ward of the city, electing two members of 
the city council, a boy and a girl. For the 
purposes of that experiment and of many 
schools since, that plan has proved to be 
effectual. 

In many schools, the principal or teacher 
who had charge of the civic training was 
changed to some other school, or for some other 
reason had to give up this feature of his school 
work for a time. No other person was pre- 
pared to carry the work forward and it either 
lost its efficiency or was dropped altogether. 

To meet this difficulty and some other 
difficulties which soon became apparent in 
many schools, I arranged to have each room 
organized as a unit, the entire responsibility 
for success resting upon the individual teacher. 
This unit is in the form of a county, village, 
town or a city, but it contains in working 
form all of the several elements of govern- 
ment. These several units have been joined 
in a state for the benefit of general co-opera- 
tion throughout the school. By this plan, 
each teacher is more fully engaged and inter- 
ested, and should any particular member of 
the teaching force drop out, the injury to the 
system cannot be so sweeping and disastrous. 



General Supervision Necessary 73 

Without authoritative general supervision, 
the knowledge of such improvements, I have 
found, is not apt to be availed of in any school 
where good results are being obtained by an 
earlier or inferior plan. The inertia of an 
established plan is generally too great to be 
overcome except by authority. 

The method was in use, with ever increasing 
value, in a certain state normal school, for 
eight years or more. The principal resigned 
to take another position. The new principal 
put an end to it at once, against the wishes of 
pupils and teachers. This is almost sure to 
occur in all schools, in which the higher author- 
ity has not put such power out of the reach 
of new principals. 

In New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, 
Massachusetts, and other states, where an 
enterprising, far-seeing, devoted teacher or 
principal adopts the method and uses it suc- 
cessfully for many years, even as long as ten 
or twelve years, the inertia of the individual 
schools and of the city and state school organ- 
izations is so great as to prevent the spread- 
ing of the use of the system from school to 
school, as one would suppose would happen 
after a thorough demonstration of its great 
value. 



74 A New Citizenship 

Every experience in this matter emphasizes 
the fact, that all essentials should be thorough- 
ly understood and completely provided for by 
law or state central authority. Great elas- 
ticity should be allowed in the details of 
the application of the method, but there are 
certain limits which the central authority or 
the law should set. For instance, the schools 
should be required to teach "equal rights for 
all and special privilege for none." One would 
suppose there could be no necessity for any 
such provision as that, were it not an actual 
fact, that in a considerable number of schools 
where there is no authoritative supervision 
intelligent in relation to these matters, the 
teacher selects one-sixth of the number of 
pupils to be citizens and has these select 
one-third. Then to this aristocratic half of 
the pupils are given all the privileges the in- 
genuity of the teacher can devise. 

Let me repeat these facts: the defense of 
our democratic institutions and the highest, 
welfare of our people demand for all children 
not only instruction in the knowledge of 
civic affairs, but also efficient training in per- 
forming civic duties, to the end that they shall 
acquire, while children, the permanent habits 






General Supervision Necessary 75 

of intelligent, honest and faithful citizenship, 
and that under existing circumstances such 
training can be had through supervision 
maintained by Congress and state legisla- 
tures, and it cannot be had by any other means. 



CHAPTER VI 

Elements, Old and New 

AS HAS already been stated, the School 
AA Republic method is founded upon 
principles which have been known 
through the ages and for the most part it is 
constructed of practices which are not new. 
That which is new and constitutes an inven- 
tion is mostly a combination of old principles 
and practices to meet and utilize present 
conditions in civilization, in other countries 
as well as in our own. 

For instance, Jesus taught that the purity 
and straight forwardness, faith, hope and love 
of child nature were needed in adult life. 
Since we know that at an early age these 
features begin to warp out of shape, we may 
reasonably assume that he knew that we ought 
to enable the child to preserve and develop 
those elements of child nature, rather than 
have the child leave them behind, in the hope 
that later he will return to them and again 
* 'become as a little child." This latter pro- 
cedure is not impossible, though so nearly so 

76 



Elements Old and New 77 

that comparatively few ever accomplish it. 
If this work of saving these desirable features 
is to be done on a large scale, both practi- 
cally and effectually, we must begin with 
little children, at the earliest stage in which 
they come into the schools. Of course the 
parents ought to begin earlier, but the parents 
of the present time do not understand. As 
soon as this work is made successful in the 
schools a generation of parents will follow 
who will understand. 

Most of us know from our own experience, 
as well as from literature of former times, 
that boys, when they reach the so-called gang 
age, like to organize debating societies, make 
laws for themselves and elect officers to carry 
their laws into execution. They adopt a 
constitution and by-laws, have a few debates, 
amend the constitution, make a new one, and 
then for want of guidance, and of something 
which may seem to them of importance to 
be done, the club disintegrates. Savonarola 
acted on this knowledge of boy nature, four 
hundred years ago, and transformed the city 
of Florence. 

So we see that a boys' republic with all 
three elements of government, legislative, 



. 



78 A New Citizenship 

executive and judicial, is not a new thing. 
Likewise it has not been extraordinary at 
any time within more than a century, for 
a school to hold an imitation election of the 
president of the United States or the governor 
of the state on the same day that the real 
election is held; or for the school to organize 
as a congress or legislature and argue policies 
and bills which were at that or some previous 
time being considered by adult bodies. It 
has not been extraordinary for a teacher to 
submit a matter of discipline to a vote of the 
pupils. For more than a century at the Uni- 
versity of Virginia the students have dealt 
with various matters of discipline. 

There is some confusion of thought in 
this matter by some persons who know more 
or less about the George Junior Republic, 
which occupies a place in the field of the 
Youths' or School Republic system. For this 
reason it seems desirable to tabulate their 
distinctive features. Prefatory to this, I will 
state that Mr. William E. George and I were 
friends before he established his boarding 
school which is called the George Junior 
Republic, and expect to be friends as long as 
we live. We were associated in some civic 



Elements Old and New 79 

reform work in New York City with Dr. 
Parkhurst, in the early nineties. 

At that time, for the New York Tribune, 
Mr. George took parties of children to a farm 
near Freeville, N. Y., for a summer outing. 
He organized them as citizens of a republic. 
He and the children were pleased, and he 
asked for and received financial help to en- 
able him to keep some of these children on 
the farm all the year round. He thus estab- 
lished a permanent industrial boarding school. 
Through his first winter, which was that of 
1895 and '96 he had ten or a dozen pupils. 
Since then there have been as many pupils 
at one time as one hundred and seventy - 
five. The number just now (1913) happens to 
be about one hundred pupils, some boys and 
some girls. The number will probably increase 
again. There are seven other such schools, 
the smallest having seven girls and no boys; 
others have from twenty to fifty pupils. 
In the aggregate these eight schools have 
about two hundred and fifty pupils. It is 
expected that such a school will be established 
in England before long. 

Not long ago Mr. George told me that he 
had always believed until 1911 that the ap- 



80 A New Citizenship 

plication of democracy could not be made in 
ordinary schools, but in that year he saw a 
school republic, the first he had ever seen, 
and was then convinced, beyond all question, 
that I had made it thoroughly practical, 
successful, and desirable. Since then he has 
aided in organizing some school republics. 

Mr. George has been well maintained in 
his work. At his school is a comfortable hotel 
where large numbers of visitors are pleasantly 
entertained. Grown persons, like "Helen's 
Babies,' ' wish to see the "wheels go round." 
Here they are satisfied in that respect and 
are much interested. Some visitors go away, 
condemning the prison system, others are 
pleased and open their purses liberally. That 
so vast a sum of money as has been used here 
can be gotten for a good work for so few boys 
and girls, would indicate that the people 
would gladly furnish funds for the larger 
field, did they realize that an amount of money 
similar to that expended for the instruction 
of the few boys and girls at the George Junior 
Republic would go far toward securing con- 
tinuous moral training for all the boys and 
girls in the United States, not only for those 
in the schools at any particular time, but for 



Elements Old and New 81 

the generations that are to follow. However, 
to make this work of moral training perma- 
nent in any school or community, as I wish 
to reiterate at every opportunity, it must have 
the authority and support of the state and 
should have state and national supervision. 

On the other hand, the Youths' or School 
Republic is not a school, a place or a thing. 
It is Democracy Systematized for 
Moral and Civic Instruction. It 
is for use wherever there are children, to help 
them to train themselves in the habits of 
health, honesty, justice, kindness, cleanliness, 
and industry, in obedience to the laws of God 
and of all lawful authority, in independence of 
thought and initiative, and in co-operation 
among themselves and with adult authorities 
for every good purpose, for their present happi- 
ness and welfare and that of the community 
in which they live, and to confirm in them 
those habits and that character which it is 
desirable they should continue to have through- 
out their lives. 

In other words, the Youth's or School 
Republic is the Laboratory Method 
of Moral Training, for use in all 
private and public day and boarding schools, 



82 A New Citizenship 

orphan asylums, reform schools, playgrounds, 
clubs, and wherever children or older persons 
of choice or by necessity live together or are 
associated for almost any purpose, such, for 
instance, as soldiers at an army post, or en- 
listed men in the navy. 

Some of the distinctive features of the 
George Junior Republic and of the Youth's 
or School Republic may be tabulated as 
follows : 



The George Junior 
Republic 

Is a certain boarding SCHOOL 
which has served as a model 
for seven other boarding 
schools. 

Mr. George would limit it to 
boys and girls above sixteen 
years old and, excluding the 
average boy or girl, would 
prefer only "those who are 
very bad or very good." 

A boy or girl is taken from an 
old environment and put in 
one that is better. 

A prison is a prominent feature 
of the school 



As it begins so late in child- 
hood, it of necessity is chief- 
ly remedial. 



The Youths' or School 
Republic 

Is not a school or place or thing, 
but is a METHOD or SYS- 
TEM of teaching. 

There is no limit of age or 
quality for children who may 
be given the benefit of the 
school republic method. 



Does not take a child from his 
home, but encourages him to 
improve hix environment. 

When the method is properly 
used, most of such wrong do- 
ing as requires punishment 
disappears in a few weeks — 
some times immediately. 

As it begins with the youngest 
children, it is chiefly con- 
structive and prevents the 
developing of wrong. 



Elements Old and New 



83 



It is limited by reason of the 
large expense, to a very few 
individuals who must be 
separated from their parents 
and provided with shelter, 
food,clothing and instruction. 



For some years past, each pupil 
has represented an expendi- 
ture for land, permanent im- 
provements, teachers, food, 
clothing, etc., from five hun- 
dred to eight hundred dollars 
a year. Not far from a mil- 
lion dollars have been expend- 
ed in this enterprise. The 
total disbursement for the 
one school for the year 1912, 
was more than ninety-five 
thousand dollars. 



The Youth's Republic is for 
any and all young people in 
the world, who may be as- 
sociated for almost any pur- 
pose, and for some grown peo- 
ple. It is used to some extent 
in many countries and has 
been officially sanctioned by 
several. Among these is the 
United States Government, 
through the War Depart- 
ment, the Bureau of Indian 
Affairs, the Bureau of Edu- 
cation and the Territory of 
Hawaii. 

There is no expense except for 
propaganda, as it does not 
have to provide food, cloth- 
ing, housing or teaching. It 
is simply a good attitude and 
a method of economy and 
efficiency, in the place of a 
bad attitude and a method of 
waste and inefficiency. A 
permanent building as an in- 
ternational headquarters from 
which to propagate and di- 
rect the movement would be 
of great value. An amount 
equal to that which has been 
invested in the George Junior 
Republic would probably do 
more to improve civilization 
and aid the cause of peace 
and friendship throughout the 
world, than an equal amount 
invested in any other way. 



84 



A New Citizenship 



Mr. Ray, a school principal in Chicago, 
used a plan from which he got good results. 
In differs from the School Republic in several 
essential features, such as the following: 

Mr. Ray's Plan. The School Republic. 

Is aristocracy, and for that Is pure democracy, and so far 
reason is of no use in teach- as it goes, it parallels the 
ing American civics. adult government, and there- 

fore teaches correct civics. 

The aristocracy is established The spirit and practice are 
by having the principal or "equal rights for all and spe- 



teacher appoint arbitrarily, 
one- sixth of the pupils to be 
citizens, the pupils appoint 
two-sixths. Fifty per cent, 
of the pupils may be left out. 
"The citizens are accorded 
all possible liberties about the 
school, the same as teachers. 
They may enter the front 
door at any time; may leave 
the room when necessary, or 
sit in the reading rooms be- 
fore or after school." In 
keeping with so undemocra- 
tic a government, the privi- 
leged class elect "tribunes" 
who hold among themselves 
all three powers of govern- 
ment, legislative, executive, 
and judicial. Thereby the 
children gain false ideas of 
American citizenship and 
government and become ac- 
customed to practices which 
unfit them for correct prac- 
tices in adult life. 



cial privileges for none." All 
are citizens. They elect 
officers with American titles 
and duties to correspond with 
adult officers holding similar 
positions. Thus correct ideas 
and practices are gained 
from the very beginning. 
There is nothing to unlearn. 
Every thing is constructive, 
and tends toward a happy, 
dutiful, independent child 
and adult life. 



Elements Old and New 85 

Miss Brownlee's plan is mostly academic, 
but she used the School Republic method for 
some years in her own school, in Toledo, Ohio, 
till she gave up teaching, and has told me that 
she advises the use of the School Republic 
method for training in citizenship. 

There are many devices for getting the 
attention of children to right ideas, but when 
it comes to the matter of teaching right moral 
practice, including citizenship, there can be 
one right way, and only one right way, as 
in carpentry, and that is to have the ap- 
prentice or pupil do the work, under the 
guidance of a master of the art or trade. That 
is what is done by means of the School Re- 
public, but it should be noted that this method 
is exceedingly elastic and there may be an 
almost infinite number of variations of vil- 
lage, town, county, city, state, few officers, 
many officers, brief charters and laws or long 
and full of details, yet, if the correct princi- 
ples are adhered to, it is possible that all may 
be right. 

At Amherst College for a number of years 
the students had a part in their own govern- 
ment, but that, like other schemes used from 
time to time in other colleges, lacked certain 



86 A New Citizenship 

essential features and was thereby rendered 
valueless as a method for teaching morality, 
including citizenship. In fact I think it 
was not considered as such a method at all, 
but simply a device to get students to help 
the faculty to maintain order and punish 
offenders. It was not an apprenticeship in 
citizenship as the School Republic is. On 
the other hand, it was a mixed government 
of students and faculty and not modeled on 
a plan that would give any practice in the 
functions of American citizenship and govern- 
ment. 

At Princeton they have great satisfaction 
in an honor system among the students, but 
unless there has been some recent change, it 
has but little if anything to do with conduct 
except in connection with examinations, and 
does not aim to give practice in citizenship. 

At Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, and some other 
colleges they have a broader application of 
democracy, but the plans admit of no civic 
practice and probably have but little educa- 
tional value. 

I have heard from a number of colleges, 
that since the School Republic idea has come 
to them, they are unwilling to let their oppor- 



Elements Old and New 87 

tunity, to teach citizenship practically, go to 
waste, and are now using the new and better 
way. This is especially important for the 
country and for each individual, as in all 
probability it is the student's last chance to 
have such practice under instruction. 

Let us recapitulate. The most, if not all 
the elements of my system of moral and civic 
training, which also involves industrial train- 
ing, were known and preached in former 
times. "Do good to others, whatever they 
do to you," which expresses the principle on 
which the School Republic depends, has been 
the ideal rule of life of not only Jews and 
Christians, but of Buddhists and others. Right 
citizenship is only part, but a necessary part, 
of a right life, and a right government must 
depend upon a right citizenship. The dis- 
tinctive features of early child life, which 
most persons soon lose, are necessary ele- 
ments of right adult life. It is economical of 
force to systematically preserve and develop 
these elements in all persons, and to use the 
organized energy of children for the well- 
being of the community and for universal 
peace, rather than as at present and in times 
past, let them go to waste, and then hope that 



88 A New Citizenship 

by some unnatural process they may be restor- 
ed in the case of a few adults. 

What is good for the people is good for 
the government, and vice versa. Therefore 
the Government, local, state, and national, 
for its own defense and well-being, should make 
it a part of its business, to require that every 
school which may be controlled by any 
branch of the Government shall train its 
pupils both in right ideas and in the practices 
of right living, based on the principle of the 
Golden Rule. 

I believe it is quite new to advocate this 
idea as a governmental policy, for internal 
and external defence and general welfare. 
This is true democracy, systematized for edu- 
cational purposes, yet it is in accord with the 
religious teachings of every religious sect of 
civilization, and no reasonable person of any 
or of no sect would object to its use in the 
public schools on the ground that it is reli- 
gious and might interfere with religious liberty, 
and no reasonable student of government 
could object to it on the ground that it teaches 
wrong ideas of political ethics or wrong civic 
practices, for it does not. 

I systematized these ideas and practices for 



Elements Old and New 89 

moral and civic training in public schools 
and have applied the system in schools of 
nearly every description, in clubs and play- 
grounds, and it may be applied in an infinite 
number of forms in every kind of association 
of young or older people where some measure 
of instruction may be supplied and let it be 
noted that the element of instruction is 
essential. 

The Boy Scouts and the Campfire Girls are 
in the same spirit as the School Republic. The 
former depend upon volunteer teachers as 
do Sunday schools, while the latter furnishes 
them and all other teachers of young people a 
method of teaching self-control and inde- 
pendence, and all the moral elements and 
right practices of citizenship and of govern- 
ment. I wish that every School Republic 
might have within it a Boy Scouts and a 
Campfire Girls department and that every 
School Republic citizen of right age might be 
a Boy Scout or a Campfire Girl. 

The work of the American Institute of 
Child Life is mostly in families and with 
individual children, and is in hearty co- 
operation with the School Republic. 

In the face of opposition and difficulties, 



90 A New Citizenship 

I have worked for the general adoption of 
this system, till it has been adopted by a 
large number of schools, has been awarded 
a gold medal, the highest distinction of a 
famous scientific society, and has been recog- 
nized and sanctioned by several governments, 
including our own. 

These facts would seem to be enough to 
differentiate my system from all other edu- 
cational plans and endeavors. 



CHAPTER VII 
Typical Objections and Misconceptions 

SOME friends of the cause of the labo- 
ratory method of teaching citizen- 
ship canvassed two hundred schools 
about New York City, where all have heard 
many times of the School Republics in their 
midst, but only a few really understand the 
motive or the principles involved. They 
would be scarcely human, under these circum- 
stances, were they not ready with very posi- 
tive objections and statements. The fol- 
lowing objections were gathered from them 
and are typical. Many of the answers are 
made by a New York City principal who has 
been using the method for about seven years. 

Objection No. 1. Pupil citizenship calls 
for a mental development that children do 
not possess. Neither is it desirable that child- 
ren should become "legislative, judicial, and 
executive." We want to keep them young as 
long as we can. 

Answer. We have found the pupils in the 
School Republic adequately and normally de- 

91 



92 A New Citizenship 

veloped, able to conduct their own affairs — 
under discreet supervision. As for the con- 
tention that self government induces precoc- 
ity, it is unfounded. The children in my 
school, both officers and citizens, are thorough- 
ly normal, healthy, and sport-loving young 
Americans. 

No. 2. It takes up too much time. 

Answer. The actual time consumed by 
the formal side of the School Republic is ten 
minutes for election at the beginning of the 
school term and the time of three teachers 
for one hour after school each week ; the latter 
a voluntary work of the teacher. This can and 
should be provided for in the curriculum. 

No. 3. Children, when vested with power, 
become arrogant. 

Answer. Seven years of pupil citizenship 
have failed to bring forth a dominating of- 
ficial. 

No. 4. If men cannot successfully govern 
themselves, how can children? 

Answer. No amount of a priori reasoning 
can argue away the fact that the children do 
govern themselves relatively well. May it 
not be one of the contributory causes of the 
shortcomings of our adult democracy that as 



Typical Objections 93 

children our people were not effectively train- 
ed for participation in civic life? Are we not 
now paying the price of the despotic school- 
master rule of the old days? What prepara- 
tion for living in a democracy was ever so 
ill designed as the none too benevolent des- 
potism of the birch-rod master? And even 
under the present system of text book civics 
what actual preparation is there for life as 
a citizen? The science of numbers is taught 
by the use of numbers; physical training is 
carried out by a scientifically developed 
course of physical exercises ; drawing is draw- 
ing; and nature study is pursued largely by a 
first-hand study of objects, but civics takes 
its place with astronomy in that it deals with 
things remote. The vitalization of civics 
calls for some mode of pupil self government. 

No. 5. In the last analysis the supervision 
necessarily makes mere puppets of the children. 

Answer. Not a fact. Judicious super- 
vision exercised along the lines of friendly 
control without dictation serves the two-fold 
purpose of fostering initiative and preventing 
the children from attempting too much. 

No. 6. The machinery is so elaborate that 
the purpose is destroyed. 



94 A New Citizenship 

Answer. It need not be, and in fact it is 
not. Nothing need be put into it unless there 
is a good purpose to be gained, and when any 
feature proves useless it should be dropped. 

No. 7. The energy expended is not worth 
while. 

Answer. If a wealth of school spirit and a 
splendid co-operative attitude on the part of 
teachers and pupils are not worth while, is 
anything in this world worth while? 

No. 8. Pupil self government is simply for 
show; it cannot take care of serious cases, for 
instance, thievery, etc., which come up in 
every school. 

Answer. This objection supposes that the 
entire government of the school is in the hands 
of the pupils. Rather is pupil government an 
auxiliary of the regularly constituted school 
regime and makes the handling of untoward 
events a simpler procedure than usual. 

No. 9. The children of our day are more in 
need of respect for authority than the ex- 
ercise of it. 

Answer. Why? The children of our day 
have been quickened by the enquiring spirit 
of our times and are quick to detect the shal- 
lowness of the autocratic system. But where 



Typical Objections 95 

they are trained to a rational respect for 
authority through a realization of the ne- 
cessity for it and the participation in the ex- 
ercise of it, their respect and loyalty become 
unshakable. 

No. 10. In the economic conditions under 
which we live our children need all the know- 
ledge they can get, to prepare for the struggle 
for existence. 

Answer. The economic conditions under 
which we live are extremely trying, because 
we have let slip from our grasp the power that 
rightfully belongs to us. The fundamental 
remedy is to teach our children the value of 
working together, reclaiming that power and 
reestablishing the conditions of true democ- 
racy. Pupil citizenship detracts nothing 
from the studies but helps to develop a great 
interest in all of them. 

No. 11. Pupil citizenship destroys one of 
the greatest influences of the school, that is, 
the principal's and teachers' personal influence. 

Answer. Through seven years, the princi- 
pal, teachers, and pupils in my school have 
been brought constantly into closer and more 
efficient co-operation, by means of pupil citi- 
zenship. 



96 A New Citizenship 

No. 12. The activities of school citizen- 
ship are mere play and are recognized as such 
by the pupils. 

Answer. They have every element of good 
play but in addition to this they involve team 
work that produces immediate good results, 
morally and civically. The pupils consciously 
imitate the procedure of enlightened citizens, 
and find great enjoyment in it. Therein lies 
a great value of the method. They work, 
they play, they learn, they develop, they pre- 
pare. What more can one ask of an educa- 
tional method than that it mould character 
effectively and joyfully? 

No. 13. We have self government without 
the machinery. Our children are orderly, 
polite, and considerate. We do not need legis- 
latures, courts, police, etc. 

Answer. And when the children leave the 
school, they will continue to be orderly, polite, 
and considerate. Each will go his own way 
and work out his own salvation, thinking 
that the government of his city and state and 
nation is to be left to the politician. And when 
he awakes to the fact that the politicians are 
in the government business for what they can 




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Typical Objections 97 

get out of it, and he undertakes to ameliorate 
conditions by enlisting the interest of his 
neighbors and friends, he will find them pre- 
occupied, apathetic. Pupil co-operation aims 
to make active rather than apathetic citi- 
zenship, and it succeeds. 

No. 14. There are so many new and desir- 
able suggestions offered for improving the 
schools that we hesitate to adopt this before 
we estimate its relative importance. 

Answer. Pupil citizenship does not compete 
with vocational training, school gardens, and 
other suggested additions to the curriculum. 
Rather it supplements all school work by 
putting the pupils on a sounder basis for 
effective work in every branch of study. Under 
the conventional school regime, regulations 
and improvements come from the principal's 
office. With pupil co-operation each child 
feels a responsibility for the common welfare 
and feels free to "speak up," to correct a 
defect or to suggest an improvement. 

No. 15. A certain school did not use the 
School Republic plan, but a modification of it. 

Answer. As frequently used, this is a mis- 
nomer and is misleading. Any school govern- 
ment that in spirit and plan is in harmony 



98 A New Citizenship 

with the Declaration of Independence and the 
Constitution of the United States, is a form 
of the School Republic, but not a ' 'modi- 
fication' ' of it. There are School Villiages, 
Towns, Counties, Cities, School States, and 
School Federal Governments, all of which 
are forms of the School Republic, but any 
modification or departure from the spirit or 
plan of these historic documents vitiates its 
value for civic instruction and then it may 
be a "modification of the School Republic." 

No. 16. A simpler plan would be better. 

Answer. People without successful or any 
experience with the School Republic who are 
inclined to cavil and set up theories as opposed 
to well attested facts, and there are some such, 
make such errors as the following : 

The children, or part of them, of a school 
may elect one or two from each room to repre- 
sent them; to these representatives are given 
all the powers of government, legislative, 
executive and judicial. This, the careless 
thinker says is less complicated than to give 
the executive power to one pupil or party of 
pupils, the legislative to another and the 
judicial to a third. It may be slightly less 
complicated on paper or for the teacher, but 






Typical Objections 99 

it is more complicated for the children. In 
fact, however, the difference in complication 
is so slight that you might as well argue about 
whether it is best to break the big or the 
little end of a boiled egg. If one teaches 
correct civics and the other incorrect, the 
difference is serious and worthy of considera- 
tion. 

No. 17. The School Republic is a system 
of "monitors." 

Answer. The School Republic has no re- 
lation to the monitorial system. Monitors 
are spies to extend the monarchical or dic- 
tatorial authority of the teacher. On the 
other hand, officers in the school republic are 
elected by the pupil citizens to enforce their 
own laws, which give expression to the best 
sentiment and the civic conscience of the 
school. 

It may be well to note these facts: in the 
School Republic only three officers are abso- 
lutely necessary, an executive, a judge, and 
a presiding officer. The last presides over 
meetings of the pupils, all of whom are citizens 
and consequently legislators. Other officers 
may be added when the teacher and pupils 
see that there is some other work to be done 



100 A New Citizenship 

which can be given with advantage to officers 
to perform. According to the energy and 
interest of the teacher, this development will 
be slow or rapid. 

No. 18. Children are not judicial. 

Answer. No person is judicial till he learns 
to be, and a child can be taught this the same 
as other things. We know this by large ex- 
perience. See the paragraph on "The Court/ ' 
in the Appendix. 

No. 19. I do not want my child bossed by 
another child. 

Answer. In a properly conducted School 
Republic there is no "bossing." If a child 
persists in breaking a law which he has helped 
to make, it is right that his fellow citizens of 
the school should take legal and orderly steps 
to prevent his further interference with their 
rights. If he appears before the school court, 
it is in the presence of the teacher who is 
giving instructions in these matters and cor- 
rects unjust judgment as he would correct any 
other error in the school work. Most offenses 
of school children are not in the presence of a 
teacher, and if abated, must of necessity be 
through the instrumentality of the children 
themselves and the development of a better 



Typical Objections 101 

spirit. This is easily accomplished by the 
School Republic method, which always appeals 
to one's better self. 

No. 20. It encourages tattling. 

Answer. Tattling and other disagreeable 
practices may develop in any school, but the 
teacher can with a little tact check, by means 
of the School Republic method, all such things. 
The teacher ought to show the children the 
difference between the tattling of a busybody 
and the giving of such information of wrong- 
doing as will enable the authorities to enforce 
the laws of the democracy. Our institutions 
demand the latter, and in that light the per- 
son who conceals the wrong is a party to it 
and is, to use terms so harsh that they may 
not be misunderstood, a traitor, to that 
extent, to our country. Our schools and col- 
leges failing to take cognizance of this matter 
have permitted if not directly encouraged 
such disloyalty to our democratic institutions 
and the cause of honesty, morality and de- 
cency in general. Our educational institu- 
tions can easily rectify this wrong by means of 
the School Republic method. 

No. 21. You must conquer a school in 
preparation for self-government. 



102 A New Citizenship 

Answer. I have heard a very intelligent 
and prominent school master, who has made 
a great success of his School Republic, re- 
mark: "I worked four years to prepare my 
school for self-government before introducing 
the School Republic. ,, His pupils lost four 
good years of the purifying, life-giving spirit 
of a righteous democracy. In those four years 
some hundreds of children graduated from 
his school without ever having come in con- 
tact with any government except that of a 
tyrannical monarchy, however kindly it may 
have been, and they did not learn to govern 
themselves, even if there was an outward 
show of obedience to their teachers. A 
broken and cowed spirit is not the best 
material for a live and valuable democracy. 
The School Republic itself is the best means 
for preparing for self-government. 

No. 22. They are trying the School Re- 
public in a certain school. 

Answer. The School Republic method of 
character building has been proved in so 
many schools to be correct, not only in theory 
but in practice and results, that when it is 
introduced into any school hereafter, the test 
that follows will not be of the efficacy of 



Typical Objections 103 

the method, but of the intelligence, enthu- 
siasm, tact and perseverance of the person or 
persons using it. If the children's interest 
wanes, it is because the teacher's interest has 
already waned. If any wrong appears, it 
comes to the surface at once and the method 
provides the means for checking it instantly. 
Should it continue and develop, it discloses 
the fact that the teacher is not using such 
intelligence and diligence as is necessary for 
good results in teaching mathematics or any 
other subject in the school. This feature is 
of great value to a teacher who is not thorough- 
ly successful, but is desirous of finding what 
his weak point is, that he may correct it. 

On the other hand, the citizens of a suc- 
cessful School Republic will be a living monu- 
ment to the worth of their teacher, one which 
even the most careless observers will notice 
and appreciate. In the words of Rev. Thomas 
R. Slicer, of New York City, "It is an easy 
and effective test of the capacity, flexibility 
and real human interest of a teacher. The 
rule-of- thumb teachers 'do not want it,' but 
the teacher of that type is not himself wanted. 
The task-master still exists here and there, 
but he becomes more and more rare, while 



104 A New Citizenship 

the guide and friend is increasing. This is 
the type sought for by those who commit 
their children to the teacher's care." 

Peace and good will to all mankind, and 
a higher and happier civilization are coming, 
and the children are the ones, led by good 
teachers, who can and who will usher in the 
better times for all humanity. 



CHAPTER VIII 

Experiences and Conclusions 

School Republic and Teacher's Authority 

Compared with that of Adult 

Government 

A VISITOR asked special privilege to ad- 
dress the court, and explained that the 
relation of the teacher to the Republic 
was similar in some respects, to that of the leg- 
islature of Massachusetts to the City of Bos- 
ton; that the legislature of Massachusetts gives 
the City of Boston in its charter the right to 
govern itself under certain conditions, and 
that, so long as the City of Boston does govern 
itself, preserving order and enforcing the 
law, the State of Massachusetts does not inter- 
fere; that in this same relation between the 
teachers and the school, the School Republic 
would not be interfered with so long as it 
fulfilled the conditions of its charter, but that 
in any great crisis when the city should fail 
to enforce the law and preserve the peace, 

105 



106 A New Citizenship 

the State being the larger and more respon- 
sible political body, could and would step 
in and take the reins of government out of 
the hands of the local authorities until order 
was re-established and the community at 
peace again. 

Discipline Not High Enough Motive to 

Command Success. A Higher Plane 

Of Life and of Citizenship Is 

The School Republic is both a system of 
school government and a method of moral and 
civic training. It is of more importance as a 
method of training than as a system of govern- 
ment. In both of these regards, however, 
the same as in the teaching of arithmetic or 
anything else, its success always depends 
upon the qualifications and interest of the 
teachers in charge. A number of teachers 
having a measure of tact and enthusiasm 
have adopted this system for the purpose of 
improving the government of their schools 
and have been successful in this respect. The 
discipline and order of their schools have been 
improved, the activity of the students in the 
school government has been a great benefit. 
Even in these cases the principal, to accom- 



Experiences and Conclusions 107 

plish his purpose, was compelled to appeal to 
a higher motive. Discipline for its own sake 
may be a high motive, but it is not high 
enough to engage the interest, loyalty, and 
enthusiasm of average young people. A 
higher plane of life and the service of genuine 
and faithful citizenship are together a high 
enough aim to engage the continuous and best 
efforts of almost every boy and girl, if properly 
held before them by their teachers. 

Administrative Departments 

The various departments of service which 
have a place in our grown-up city govern- 
ment are easily adapted to and imitated by 
the children. The Board of Health is a use- 
ful part of the organization and is to be found 
in almost every School Republic. Boards of 
Social Service render most desirable and use- 
ful service in various ways, suggested by 
circumstances as they arise in the school or 
community. They always look after the 
comfort and happiness of new pupils, and aid 
them to get into the spirit of the school de- 
mocracy. A Board of Public Works is usual. 
Some School Republics have Boards of Edu- 
cation, Departments of Agriculture and Ath- 



108 A New Citizenship 

letic Commissions. Even such matters as 
keeping the school books covered and sending 
flowers to sick children are embodied in the 
organic functions of some School Republics. 
A large amount of testimony is at hand from 
teachers showing the value of the organiza- 
tion in enlisting the activities of the children 
along these lines. Commissioners of Games, 
Fire, Police, Street Cleaning, Editors, Li- 
brarians and other officers are arranged for 
by the legislative body whenever it is desired 
to have any particular interest taken care of 
systematically. Each one of these officers, 
at the end of each week and of his term of 
office, is expected to give a written report to 
the executive. 

Police 

School Republic policemen are always in- 
structed in civic politeness. They are told 
that in the great cities a policeman's principal 
business is not to arrest people, but to keep 
people from getting into trouble and to be 
generally useful and kind to those who need 
protection and care. They are also told that 
under ordinary circumstances, warnings must 
precede arrests; that the best governed city 



Experiences and Conclusions 109 

is that in which the fewest arrests are neces- 
sary, but they are impressed at the same time 
with the necessity of being firm and loyal to 
the law and the welfare of the school. 

In making an arrest, the policeman does 
not lay hands on the offender. He simply 
notifies him that he is under arrest and reports 
the case in detail to the chief of police. 

In an East Boston school where a number 
of valuable details have been worked out, 
an arrest consists in the policeman's sending 
the offender to the chief of police, who has an 
office and is always at his desk from 8 :40 to 
9 :00 o'clock and from 1 :40 to 2 :00 o'clock. 
This chief of police investigates the complaint 
at once, so far as is necessary to determine 
whether there shall be any further action. 
As a matter of fact, very few cases have gone 
any further, the chief of police having proved 
to be a good advisor and peace-maker, and 
one who could make his warnings effective. 

Court 

The School Republic court is usually com- 
posed of one judge, although there is some- 
times a bench of three or more judges. The 
court is conducted with solemnity and de- 



110 A New Citizenship 

corum. The sheriff, and clerk of the court 
are in their places. In some schools there is 
a prosecuting attorney, but generally it is 
better to get along without this office. The ac- 
cused persons are instructed to plead "guilty" 
or "not guilty" and, as they have, on accept- 
ing citizenship, agreed to plead "guilty" 
when they are actually guilty, they generally 
plead truthfully. When the plea is "guilty," 
the extenuating circumstances are carefully 
inquired into. When "not guilty," witnesses 
are examined and the usual procedure of a 
court of justice is followed. The judges are 
taught to be absolutely impartial and fair, 
and to seek, in their punishments, to effect a 
cure of evil rather then retribution. The 
accused person may request to be heard by a 
jury. This is not desirable in a primary 
school, and scarcely ever in a grammar school. 
Decisions of the court must receive the 
sanction of the teacher or principal before 
being carried into execution. 

Judicial Frame of Mind 

The cultivation of the judicial frame of 
mind is not by any means confined to the 
judges in these School Republics. In a small 



Experiences and Conclusions 111 

school particularly, practically all of the 
children, as well as the judge, become ac- 
quainted with the details of the cases that 
come up, and get some discipline in reserving 
judgment, in weighing evidence, in respect- 
ing the rights of the accused, in maintaining 
an impartial attitude and in seeking equal 
justice for all. The police and court functions 
however are but a part of the field in which the 
School Republic operates. 

Punishments 

The School Republic is not for the purpose 
of punishing but rather of removing all causes 
for punishments. Such punishments as may 
be proper in a school before the School 
Republic is organized, will probably be as 
proper afterward. If the teacher used the 
method with some tact, in case there has 
previously been frequent cause for punishing, 
the number of cases should decrease per- 
ceptibly after the first ten days, if not im- 
mediately. 

In all schools provision should be made 
that no punishment shall be carried into effect 
until first approved by the teacher. 

The care with which punishments are 



112 A New Citizenship 

determined, and their fitness and justice, 
are often matters of surprise to teachers. 
Still it is the common experience that the 
punishments are about the same as those to 
which the pupils have been accustomed under 
the old regime. 

In one of the Massachusetts schools, the 
first person to be arrested was the mayor. 
In passing through the lower hall at recess 
he had mischievously rung the bell. He was 
tried, found guilty, and sentenced to come 
to the school-house early and ring the bell 
for the janitor each morning for a certain 
length of time. 

Such penalties as detention after school 
with task, temporary deprivation of citizen- 
ship, sweeping the walks, writing copies of 
the School Republic laws, taking away the 
privilege of playing certain games, seques- 
tration in the playgrounds during recess, rec- 
ommending the principal to write a letter 
to parents, and deprivation of office, are 
perhaps the most common. The object of 
the court should not be "to make the punish- 
ment fit the crime,' ' as to severity, but to 
cure the offender of the propensity to do wrong. 
Sometimes this is accomplished by suspend- 




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Experiences and Conclusions 1 13 

ing punishment, and sometimes by a better 
understanding of the right and wrong, and 
an agreement to observe the laws in the future. 

Courtesy, Dignity, Independence, Poise, 
a Judicial Frame of Mind 

The principal of a large public grammar 
school for girls writes after several years' 
use of the School Republic method, that de- 
mocracy in her school gives to the girls, far 
beyond all previous conditions, courtesy, 
dignity, independence, poise, a judicial frame 
of mind, and both the desire and the habit of 
co-operating for every good purpose; and it 
is worthy of special note that they soon learn 
to bow gracefully to the expressed will of the 
majority, and to heartily support the adopted 
measures and elected officers, even though 
their votes were cast in opposition. 

What this principal says of her experience 
with many hundreds of grammar school girls 
is said just as definitely by principals of 
primary, grammar and high schools, where 
there are both boys and girls. In the latter 
case the boys and girls, getting the same train- 
ing, discover once and for all time, that there 
is no special qualification of those of either sex, 
because of peculiarities of the sex, to justify 



114 A New Citizenship 

any difference in social or political influence. 

Monarchy in School — Waste of Energy and 
Public Money and Injury to Character. 

Democracy in School — Economy of Energy 
and Public Money: Developes Efficiency 
and Strength of Character. 

Intelligent training in democracy increases 
the efficiency of the school in every branch 
and particular. This is illustrated in part if 
not altogether by the facts related in the 
following extract from a letter from a teacher 
of carpentry, a graduate of Yale University. 

"It was not until after I began teaching 

carpentry in the grammar schools of 

that I had the opportunity of learning at 
first hand what the School Republic can do 
for a community. 

"About half my time is spent in a school 
where the pupils are disciplined (?) by teachers 
who have the old idea that every child is ir- 
responsible and must be watched closely or 
he will make trouble, and needless to say, 
there is a plenty of it. The rest of my time 
is in a school where the pupils govern them- 
selves by the School Republic method, and 
there is practically no trouble. Neither does 
the process stop with merely securing better 






Experiences and Conclusions 115 

discipline. The pupils come to feel that the 
school and all other public property is in 
trust for their benfit,and they carefully guard 
it from any defacement; parents of these 
children take a more active interest in school 
affairs; and both parents and children realize 
that the most effective work necessitates the 
intelligent co-operation of teachers, pupils and 
parents. 

"A special teacher, unlike the grade teacher, 
is almost wholly dependent upon the esprit 
de corps of the school. In the one school I 
have to give scarcely a thought to the matter 
of discipline. The boys are considerate of 
one another's rights; they are full of good 
cheer; they have learned to co-operate for 
every good purpose; they are thoroughly ap- 
preciative of every effort to aid them in get- 
ting an education; every ounce of effort on 
my part to aid them produces its full effect 
for good — not a word, not a motion is lost, 
everything counts for the geratest efficiency 
in constructive results. On the other hand, 
the boys who are accustomed to being govern- 
ed by the iron-hand method will respond to 
nothing else; they cannot give the maximum 
attention to the subject matter — they do not 



116 A New Citizenship 

know how — neither can I, and in consequence 
their effort and mine is largely wasted and a 
real financial loss to the community is the result. 

"Your new system of democratic govern- 
ment in a school means proper attention on the 
part of the pupils; proper attention means 
maximum of time spent on the subject mat- 
ter and consequent rapid progress of the pupil ; 
this means increased capacity of the pupil in 
production and therefore greater value to 
the community. 

"This is considering only the economic side : 
I shall not attempt to tabulate the social and 
political advantages. They are very great 
and immensely more important." 

It is worth while to note that these state- 
ments are not based upon casual observations, 
but daily contact with the boys in two 
schools, through a number of years, each year 
a new set of boys. The conditions are per- 
sistent from year to year. In one school 
there is always financial and moral waste, 
while in the other there is no waste of time, 
energy or material, or of moral force — every- 
thing tends toward economy, efficiency, hon- 
esty, moral development and strength of 
character. 






CHAPTER IX 
A Long Chapter of Short Stories 
Equal Rights In a School Republic 

SEVERAL years ago I organized a school 
state in the Boys' department of a 
Brooklyn School, in which there were 
about 4,200 pupils 2,200 in the boys' depart- 
ment. Practically all were of Polish or Rus- 
sian Jewish parentage, and possibly half were 
born in Eastern Eurpoe. 

The principal said that, although the boys 
were bright in their classes, they were dis- 
couragingly stupid in their meetings, but 
he was compelled to admit that this condition 
helped to make clear the desirability of giv- 
ing them some opportunity to learn how to 
conduct themselves in an assembly. After 
the first two weeks the boys improved rapidly 
in the use of parliamentary law and in debate. 
At the end of six weeks I was present at a 
session of their state legislature when a bill 

117 



118 A New Citizenship 

was introduced, requesting the girls to organ- 
ize themselves into school cities and to join 
the boys' school state on equal terms with the 
boys. A representative, on being recognized 
by the Chair, said : 

"I don't see why we should allow the girls 
to vote when our mothers do not have this 
right. I do not know why women are not 
allowed to vote, but I think our country 
must have some good reason for not letting 
them, and I believe for that reason it would be 
very improper for us to give this right to the 
girls. It seems to me that it would be both 
impudent and disloyal to our country. I 
hope that no one will vote for this bill." 

It was delightful to see this young Russian- 
born American's faith in the absolute wisdom 
and justice of his newly adopted country. 

Another boy was quickly on his feet, but 
in support of the bill. It would be impossible 
to quote his words exactly, although gram- 
matical and well chosen. He said : 

"I understand that in the western part of 
our country are several states where the 
women have the same civic rights as the men. 
In those states, I hear that the men attend to 
their civic duties much better than the men 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 119 

do in the eastern states and that the women 
attend to their civic duties as faithfully and 
intelligently as the men do. 

"If that is true, who knows but that in 
eight years from now (the boy was thirteen 
years old) the women will be allowed to vote 
in the State of New York? And if that should 
come to pass and the women who are now 
girls in this school do not understand their 
civic duties, who will be to blame but you and 
I, the members of this legislature? I am in 
favor of this bill, and hope the member who 
has just spoken will see it in this light." 

The next to be recognized was a less eager 
but very level-headed looking boy. He said : 

"I think that, while women voting or not 
voting is very interesting, this has nothing 
to do with the bill. We have made a law 
to prevent the scattering of paper and other 
litter in the streets of our school district. 
I think the boys do not break the law, but 
the streets seem almost as dirty as before 
we made it. If the girls helped to make the 
laws they would not break them, but would 
help to enforce them and then we would have 
clean streets, and there would be more use in 
our trying to make things go right. I shall 



120 A New Citizenship 

vote for this bill and I hope every member 
will." 

This argument settled the matter, and the 
bill passed unanimously, the boy who had 
spoken in opposition showing evident enthusi- 
asm in his conversion. 

The girls acted on the suggestion of this 
bill and accepted its invitation, but between 
the boys and girls they arranged something 
quite new in school or adult statecraft. The 
Senate consists of girls elected by girls, and 
the lower house of boys, elected by the boys. 
The principals of the two departments are 
well pleased with the result of this form. 
Ordinarily in place of one state of 4,200 citi- 
zens, I should have made at least two states 
and probably six or more. Then we should 
have a fine opportunity, by uniting the states, 
to teach practically another phase of our 
American government, and there are other 
advantages in the smaller states. I have 
followed this latter plan in many schools 
since then, and with good results. 

The Regeneration of Maria 

Some time ago I met Miss Davis and asked 
her what had become of Maria Arigo. She 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 121 

replied that Maria had long ago gone out 
into the great wide world, but that up to the 
last account she had maintained her made- 
over, fine, strong character. The story of 
Maria is as follows : 

In the fall of 1897, in Puplic School No. 1, 
in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, in 
the City of New York, Miss Davis, the 
principal, asked me to organize her school as 
a School City. In the fifth grade was a girl 
whose name we will imagine is Maria Arigo. 
She had been a pupil in the school for several 
years, but no teacher had reached her heart. 
She defied her teachers and continually led 
the girls into mischief. She was untidy as to 
her person and clothes, and careless as to 
how often and when she would come to school. 
To the disgust and dismay of her teacher, 
Maria was elected to represent her classmates 
in the School City Council. The teacher re- 
garded this as a personal affront, and, after 
school, went to the principal and said the 
girls had insulted her by electing this one to 
be their member of the Council, and that she 
would not stand it. Miss Davis replied: 
"You know we told the girls they might 
elect whom they pleased, and I really do not 



122 A New Citizenship 

see what we can do. We certainly cannot do 
anything to-night." 

Next morning Maria was on hand early, 
clean, tidy, well dressed, in a delightful frame 
of mind, radiant in her devotion to her 
teacher and the girls, and somehow her 
lessons were evidently more interesting to her 
than they had ever been before, and she was 
thoroughly successful in leading the girls in 
general to spruce up. The fear then was that 
this was too good to continue, but two years 
afterward I heard Miss Davis tell of this 
matter in a public educational meeting and 
she said that from the day Maria Arigowas 
elected member of the city council no person 
in the school, not even any teacher, had exert- 
ed a more positive influence for cleanliness, 
neatness, promptness, good order, good scholar- 
ship, kindness, politeness, and everything 
desirable than that same Maria Arigo. 

Tommy Jones 

In the slums of Philadelphia there lives a 
little boy whom we will call Tommy Jones. 
This is not his real name, but it is a real boy 
and a real circumstance that I shall tell 
about. He lives in an alley where there is a 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 123 

great deal of misery. You would think that 
Tommy would rather go to school than be 
about there and the other places he frequented. 
But he did hate to go to school. It was 
misery, though the nicest teachers that you 
can imagine were there. He was frequently 
a truant, and when he did deign to go to 
school — the truant officer can force such a 
little fellow to go sometimes — he was very 
apt to be tardy. 

Tommy was careless as to his costume and 
as to the condition of his face and hands. 
He was a very troublesome boy altogether. 
He had entered this school when he was 
about six years old and now he was nine. 

We changed the little monarchy to a democ- 
racy — school government in general is mon- 
archy. Have you ever thought what mon- 
archy is? A little child is born and does not 
know how to manage his own affairs. Some- 
body stronger in every respect has to govern 
him. The mother governs the little one, and 
that is parental government and also it is 
monarchy, or natural government — the gov- 
ernment of the weak by the strong. The little 
one has no part in the government except 
to do whatever the mother requires. The 



124 A New Citizenship 

child goes to school, and there is more mon- 
archy. Even in college the thing has not been 
corrected. 

From the time the child is born to the time 
he leaves the high school and university the 
only government he comes in contact with 
is a monarchy, a government to which he 
must be subjected. He has no power what- 
ever in making the rules and regulations, and 
no part except to obey. Consequently the 
longer we keep an individual in school or 
college the more completely we establish his 
habits and character as a subject, not a 
participator, in his own government. 

As it happened, this dirty, mischievous, 
troublesome little boy was elected in one of 
the rooms, to be a member of the Legisla- 
ture. This was the first experience of the 
teachers of that school with anything of the 
sort. They felt — Well, we have gotten over 
some difficulties, but if the children are going 
to choose such a little rascal as that to be a 
member of the legislature, we fear for the 
little republic, so far as our school is concerned. 

The next day, instead of his clothes just 
hanging on by moral suasion, lost buttons 
were replaced and he was slicked up generally. 






A Long Chapter of Short Stories 125 

I do not know that they had even seen the 
boy with his hair brushed and combed, but 
this morning his hair was all right, his hands 
were clean, his face was tolerably clean and 
the boy was there on time. This was simply 
a revolution for that boy. The next day he 
was on time, and just as neat as the day before, 
and this kept up. He did not play truant 
again. He picked up in his class, and instead 
of being at the very tail end, very soon the 
little fellow came right up to the head. 

Six weeks after, the principal of the school 
stopped at his desk and said: ' 'Tommy, I 
am delighted to see how nicely you are 
getting on. You have not been absent once 
and you are never tardy any more. You are 
as neat as any little gentleman, and you have 
come to the very top of your class. I am 
proud of you!" The little fellow looked up 
and said, "You know, Miss Sallie, they expect 
so much from a member of the legislature/ ' 

Changed His Ways 

The transformations wrought in the char- 
acter and behavior of pupils are well illustrated 
by the case of a boy about whom his teacher 
writes as follows : "That boy was causing me 



126 A New Citizenship 

much anxiety. He was obliged to sell papers, 
and on this account was permitted to leave 
school every day one half hour before the 
time of dismissal. This arrangement was to 
hold as long as the boy was faithful and con- 
scientious in his school work. 

"All went well for a time, but after a while 
the boy grew careless in his work and deport- 
ment, and was obliged to remain during the 
whole session. 

"One day when told to remain, my atten- 
tion being elsewhere, he slipped from the 
room. He was remonstrated with on his 
return the next day, but a few days after he 
again disappeared in the same way. This 
happened whenever he was told to remain, 
unless he was personally supervised. 

"It had come to such a pass that I was 
actually lying awake nights, trying to devise 
some way of treating the subject which would 
appeal to the boy's honor. When hope was 
darkest, the blessed School City came to the 
rescue. The next morning I talked the matter 
over with the chief of police, who was a mem- 
ber of the same class. That afternoon, when 
our little friend was about to escape from the 
room, the chief placed a detaining hand on 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 127 

his arm and said quietly, 'Miss Fox told you 
to stay, and just because she's not watching 
you, that's no reason for running out.' 

"The boy slipped back into his seat, took 
a hasty survey of the room and decided that 
public opinion was on the side of the chief, 
and so quietly went on with his work. 

"The most remarkable part is that the boy 
never again has attempted to leave the room 
when told to remain, and has completely 
changed his careless ways, is industrious and 
interested in his work, and is on the most 
intimate and friendly terms with his teacher 
and his chief." — Agnes M. Fox, Teacher. 

A Growing Mayor 

"The effect of the School City, has been to 
stimulate growth in the true elements of 
character; a conscious aiming for the highest 
results in self, and a reaching out to others 
in a helpful spirit. Our mayor has illustrated 
this, as have others. He is a popular boy and 
well-meaning at heart, but last term he was a 
trial in the schoolroom. He was careless in 
deportment, inattentive in his recitations, 
and full of boyish pranks. His election caused 
me a little worry, but it told upon him. At 



128 A New Citizenship 

first he reformed outwardly — it was necessary 
that he should — but he soon found that he 
ha'd deeper work to do in himself than any- 
where else, and how that boy has grown! 
With others the same good work is going on." 
— Estelle B. Nye, Minneapolis. 

A Philadelphia Primary 

It was the morning intermission at a Phila- 
delphia Primary School. A visitor was asking 
questions of the principal about the School 
City organization that has been in operation 
in that school for seven years. Court was 
in session. Two boys came in, followed by a 
number of other children. One of the boys 
was a policeman, the other was under arrest. 

"George climbed on the fire escape," said 
the policeman. 

The culpirt, who was a bigger boy than the 
"policeman," sheepishly hung his head and 
pleaded guilty. The "case" was tried at once. 
It occupied but a few minutes, for the evi- 
dence was conclusive. George was sentenced 
by the magistrate to lose his recess for the 
remainder of the week. 

"Do they impose severe sentences on each 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 129 

other?' ' asked the visitor, who had been an 
interested spectator of the scene. 

"Well, it must be granted that the children 
are liable to inflict harsher punishment than 
the teacher would/ ' said the principal thought- 
fully. "We have to curb that tendency 
They are inclined to be a little too strict with 
each other.' ' 

"The officer seemed to have no trouble in 
bringing in the offender, though the prisoner 
was so much bigger than himself. Is that 
always the case?" 

"Invariably," was the response. "No boy 
in our record of seven years as a School City 
has ever resisted 'arrest.' And it is an in- 
teresting fact that no girls have ever been 
arrested." 

The visitor's eyes followed those of the 
principal to the long lines of children now 
marching in regular order through the corri- 
dors to their respective classrooms. 

"You may see this refreshing spectacle 
every day in the week and every week in the 
school year," declared the principal enthusi- 
astically. "The teachers are all where they 
should be, at their respective desks in the 
various classrooms, ready to receive the 



130 A New Citizenship 

scholars who come in, self- directed. All the 
lines, you may notice, have captains to take 
them up and down. ,, 

A visit to the classrooms showed the children 
as busy and occupied where the teachers were 
absent temporarily as where they were pre- 
sent. "This astonishing condition/' explained 
the principal, "is entirely due to the School 
Republic organization, which arouses a keen, 
personal sense of responsibility for the good 
order of each room." — Jane A. Stewart. 

A Night School Regenerated 

In a manufacturing suburb of [Philadelphia, 
there was for many years a night school com- 
posed of boys and girls and full-grown men 
and women, most of whom were employed 
in the factories. The school was unruly and 
the girls were said to be as lawless as the boys. 
In the spring of 1904 part of the Evening 
School Committee favored its permanent dis- 
continuance. The principal of a day school 
believed she could secure better results, and 
was permitted to try. She was getting good 
results from the School City method in her 
day school, and saw no reason why she should 
not in a night school. She asked Mr. Gill 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 131 

to assist her, and, after consultation with the 
pupils, the School City was instituted. A 
youth known by the name of Thomas Smith 
was nominated to be a member of the city 
council, when he arose and said, "If you are 
going to vote for me, call me Henry Jameson." 

A large number of the boys were convulsed 
with laughter and they applauded vigorously. 
No explanation was given. The organiza- 
tion proceeded smoothly, and at the close 
of the evening's session about twenty boys 
came to the principal's office and said that 
they had entered under fictitious names, but 
now that they were going to have a govern- 
ment of their own they wished to be registered 
under their right names. In view of the 
history of the school, this action revealed the 
fact that they had entered almost wholly 
for the sake of adventure, and in the event of 
serious trouble they did not wish to appear 
under their own names in police court; but 
now that the responsibility for order had been 
placed upon them, they had accepted it and 
turned over a new leaf. 

The disorder was at once greatly reduced. 
Neater dress, better manners, and improved 
scholarship were in evidence. Previous to 



132 A New Citizenship 

this any boy wearing a linen collar to school 
was sure to have it torn off. Within a week 
every boy, with the exception of a few who 
wore white sweaters, appeared in a stiff 
collar. They had set up for themselves new 
and higher standards and maintained them 
to the end of the night school year in the 
spring of 1905. 

Organizing a Cuban School Republic 

The old Spanish military barracks, built 
of stone around a drill ground of several acres, 
was converted into a public school for boys. 
It is a sort of fortress, but makes a spacious 
and delightful schoolhouse, all on the ground 
floor. 

At half past one, the five hundred boys 
filed into a theater down town. The Ayunta- 
miento or City Council of Guines adjourned 
its session that the members might witness 
the organizing of a School Republic. They 
were seated on the stage. Members of the 
Board of Education, the Chief of Police, and 
other city officers were there, and about a 
hundred, possibly as many as a hundred and 
fifty, other men were present. 

The Alcalde (mayor of the municipality) 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 133 

made an address, explaining the purpose and 
importance of the meeting, and introduced 
Provincial Superintendent Aguayo to pre- 
side. Mr. Aguayo spoke further on the 
same theme and introduced me. I told them 
that as I had not sufficient command of the 
Spanish to enable me to address them directly, 
I had asked one of their teachers with a 
strong voice and good delivery to read my 
address for me, which he did. I spoke briefly 
in introduction of the purposes of the School 
Republic and the boys responded to my 
remarks with great earnestness and enthusi- 
asm. 

After the speeches and the election of 
officers, I called the newly elected councilmen 
and the mayor to the stage. The mayor's 
name is Antonio Franqui. A handsomer, more 
genteelly dressed boy you could scarcely 
find in New York. The large stately Alcalde, 
of Guines, Mr. Rodriguez, presented this 
little Alcalde to the citizens of the School 
Republic, who clapped their hands and cried 
"Viva." Young Franqui catching his cue 
from his introducer, bowed, smiled, and 
thanked his fellow citizens for the honor con- 
ferred upon him, assured them that he would 



134 A New Citizenship 

try to be worthy of their confidence, and 
begged them to do their part to make theirs 
a noble city. The citizens fully demonstrated 
their approval and determination in that 
matter. By the same process, all the other 
elective officers were chosen. The Alcalde 
Franqui speaks English quite well, and thus 
he was able to assist me in getting prompt and 
rapid work. I told him to attend to the ap- 
pointment of the appointive officers the next 
day. I then told the citizens that their 
organization would not be complete till they 
should have a code of laws, and as they had 
not yet had experience in such matters and I 
had, I would offer to them a little code, which 
I would advise them to accept, and add to 
and change to suit themselves when they 
should have had time to see the special needs 
of their School Republic. 

I told them they must choose a name for 
their city. Various names were suggested 
without awakening any great enthusiasm 
until one boy shouted " Maximo Gomez," 
and there was bedlam for a few moments. 
When quiet was restored, they voted unan- 
imously to name their city "Maximo Gomez.' ' 
They sang the Cuban Hymn and adjourned. 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 135 

The whole thing was thoroughly dramatic. 
Mr. Rodriquez, filled with emotion which 
he could not repress, said: "I fear, Mr. Gill, 
that it may sound extravagant, but I say 
to you with deliberation, this is the greatest 
day of my life ; it is the greatest event in the 
history of this town. I have seen the seeds 
of citizenship sown and take root, not only 
in the minds and hearts of these 500 boys, 
but in the hearts of the representative men 
of this city." . . . One after another of 
the chief men of the city came up, and, un- 
bidden, pledged me their support for the 
movement inaugurated that day. (From 
official reports published by the United 
States War Department.) 

He 's All Right 

A careful observer relates the following 
incident : 

"The children, as a rule, intuitively choose 
the very ones among their number who are 
best fitted for the offices. An illustration of 
this was given in one of the Philadelphia 
schools where there were 500 pupils, includ- 
ing about a half dozen negro children. A 
colored boy was one of the first pupils to be 



136 A New Citizenship 

nominated for office; but before he was 
finally elected, the children successively nomi- 
nated him for council, judge, clerk of court, 
and sheriff, and his election eventually as 
sheriff was virtually unanimous. Such per- 
sistency on the part of his supporters led to 
a query as to the reason; and the response 
was; /He's all right. He's awfully severe, 
but he wants things to go right.' " — Jane A. 

Stewart. 

Protects Property 

Another teacher says : "An immediate bene- 
fit which we have derived is the protection 
to lamp posts, fences, houses, etc. Since 
the organization last year there have been no 
marks of any kind to be erased from any public 
or private property which is exposed to our 
children. This was not the case previously." 

Raising The Flag 

"Formerly the janitor unfurled the flag 
and no one seemed to notice it. Now the 
children of the Department of Public Works 
raise and lower it with patriotic ceremony, 
and the flag never gets a day's rest nor a 
wetting. The love, respect, and care which 
the children now have for our flag and country 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 137 

cannot possibly be expressed in words. Their 
badges have given them something tangible 
to which they can look and remember they 
stand for loyalty to all that is right and must 
be honored." 

Forming The Lines 

"Time and energy are saved in the form- 
ing of lines. It stands to reason that five 
policemen can do more than one teacher, 
and they do. At the same time the children 
do not resent the word from their policemen, 
because they themselves have invested them 
with power and are aiming to use the same 
authority some time in the future. It saves 
the teacher from appearing in the light of a 
monitor, dictator, or spy." — Anna A. Gorgas, 

Principal. 

Learn By Mistakes 

It is well sometimes, but not always, to 
let the children make mistakes when by so 
doing they learn their lesson better. In the 
framing of laws, for instance, they get very 
practical lessons in language and in logical 
expression of ideas. 

In a Haverhill school a law was passed one 
day prohibiting the throwing of snow-balls: 



138 A New Citizenship 

"There shall be no throwing of snow-balls." 
Right away a boy was arrested for throwing 
a snow-ball against a board fence. He had 
hurt no one. The prosecuting attorney con- 
tended that he had broken a law and there- 
fore must be punished. The judge decided 
otherwise, however, and let the boy go, and 
then wrote a note to the president of the city 
council as follows: 
"Dear President of City Council: 

"That snow-balling law is no good. I 
wish you would please fix it." 

A meeting of the city council was held 
and the law was revised to read — "There 
shall be no snow-balling that hurts anybody." 

Law Inacurately Framed 

Mr. Scudder, when principal of the New 
Paltz Normal School, where the school city 
had been in operation for over 6 years, tells 
of a law passed by his city council prohibiting 
crossing the front lawn. The school was 
built facing the river with a grove of trees 
in front and no lawn at all. The lawn re- 
ferred to was a large lawn at the side and back 
of the building. One day a boy was caught 
crossing this lawn and convicted of violating 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 139 

this law. He was sentenced to do a certain 
amount of work at a printing press and 
served out the sentence. Another boy, later, 
was found guilty of the same offense, but he 
discovered a loop-hole in the law; declared 
that he had not crossed the front lawn and 
appealed to the supreme court. The supreme 
court reviewed the case, reversed the deci- 
sion of the lower court and relieved the boy 
of his sentence, whereupon the boy who 
had already served sentence instituted a 
suit against the school city for false imprison- 
ment. Perhaps in no other school city would 
this last action be taken, but it was encouraged 
by Mr. Scudder, who wished to give his pupils 
as thorough a knowledge of civic and judi- 
cial procedure as possible. The form of the 
law was changed. 

Children's Common Sense Put 
To Severe Test 

A mayor, who, strange to say, had the free- 
dom of the school, had to have his liberty 
curtailed. He was an exceedingly active boy, 
interested in everything and so much absorb- 
ed by the various activities of the school 
city, to which he gave superfluous and quite 



140 A New Citizenship 

unnecessary attention, that he neglected his 
studies. The principal might tactfully have 
shown the boy the desirability of limiting his 
active work as chief executive to time out 
of school hours and only a brief period in 
the morning and afternoon session, but, 
instead of this, used his prerogative as prin- 
cipal and posted the following notice on the 
School City bulletin board: "The mayor may 
attend to his duties as mayor during school 
hours only from 11:45 to 12:00 and from 
3 :45 to 4 :00 o'clock/ ' It is not very strange 
that the young mayor was hurt. 

During the noon hour a session of the 
city council was being held and a child 
handed the president of the city council 
the following message: — "For reasons that I 
do not care to explain I hereby resign as mayor 
of this school city." It was signed by the 
mayor. "What whall we do now? We have no 
mayor", said the president of the city council. 
"Oh, yes, we have," said one of the members; 
"he can't go till we let him off." They very 
soon had the matter attended to quite as 
nicely as any adult body could have done. 
They seemed generally to understand that 
he had resigned in anger because of the way 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 141 

his liberty was curtailed, so they appointed 
a committee to wait on him and find out his 
reasons for resigning. When he found that 
it was necessary to write the reasons, he was 
unwilling to do so and withdrew his resigna- 
tion. The next news from that school was 
that this boy was running for reelection. 
He had learned a lesson in self-control as 
well as a lesson in civics. The principal 
declared him to be a very good mayor. 

An Unruly Girl Converted 

In a large school for girls one of the pupils, 
who had always made her teachers trouble, 
was very unruly and defied the school city 
officers, refusing to go to court. For contempt 
of court she was deprived of citizenship, 
and the other girls were instructed by the 
judge not to talk to her during any recess. 
This severe punishment was not inflicted 
until the offence became flagrant. The girl's 
mother came to the principal and protested, 
but the principal so thoroughly approved of 
the action of the court that she refused to 
interfere. Of course the punishment was un- 
bearable and in a few days the girl came to 
the court asking to be tried and reinstated in 



142 A New Citizenship 

citizenship. This was done and the girl has 
since been a loyal and enthusiastic citizen 
and has been elected to office and served with 
honor and efficiency. 

A Moral Victory 

In one school the chief of police one day 
became angry at a classmate and threw a 
book at him. In a moment he remembered 
his high office and was ashamed. He took 
a piece of paper, wrote his resignation and 
sent it to the mayor, who was in the same room. 
The mayor wrote on the back of it: "I 
will not accept it" and sent it back to him. 
By recess the chief of police had thought out 
a course of action. He went to a policeman 
and said : — "I want you to arrest me for what 
I did: what's good for the others is good for 
me." He took his penalty and was reap- 
pointed chief of police. 

Backward Boy Awakened 
By a New Ambition 

In a Primary School in Lowell, Mass., a 
12 -year old boy in the 3rd grade, who had 
been exceedingly troublesome and backward 
and an almost hopeless truant, came to his 
teacher one day with the declaration that he 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 143 

proposed to be mayor of the school city. 
"Oh, no," said the teacher, "the citizens will 
not elect such a boy as you are for mayor, 
for you are very backward in your studies 
and your truancy record has been a very bad 
one." But the boy shook his head and de- 
clared he was going to be mayor. The next 
day he came to school on time and had his 
lessons. This fine record was continuous 
from that time. His ambition had made him 
a new boy. 

He was by far the largest boy in school and 
his candidacy boomed. When the ballots 
were counted, it was discovered that his rival, 
a smaller boy in the same grade, had one more 
vote than he, but one of the votes cast for 
the smaller boy was badly erased and de- 
fective. The claim was made that this ballot 
should be thrown out, a tie declared and a 
new election ordered. Appeal was made to 
the principal of the school. She referred the 
matter to the superintendent of schools and 
he in turn referred it to the city solicitor of 
Lowell, who decided in favor of the validity 
of the erased ballot and the election of the 
smaller boy. 

The new mayor at once offered the defeated 



144 A New Citizenship 

candidate the office of chief of police, but he 
preferred to be elected president of the city 
council, which was done. 

These two boys worked together beauti- 
fully throughout the term, and the good re- 
sults of the big boy's ambition have in no 
sense been lost. 

School Republic Law Succeeds Where 
Former Regulations Fail 

In one of the Massachusetts schools where 
a School Republic had been organized, there 
had always been a rule against the smoking 
of cigarettes. The rule had always been 
broken. After the organizing of the school 
city one of the first bills introduced in the 
City Council was one for the prohibition of 
cigarette-smoking. It was introduced by a 
girl. Some of the boys in the council saw 
here an opportunity to turn their liberty 
into license and objected to the bill. The 
president of the city council, a girl in the 
8th grade, was wise enough not to put the 
bill to a vote at that session. She went to 
the principal and told him about it, and he 
counselled her to wait, saying that he hoped 
the bill would be passed unanimously and 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 145 

that she could afford to take time to get that 
result. So the council continued to debate 
the bill. The discussion ran high throughout 
the school. 

For two weeks there was no law against 
smoking cigaretts, and some of the boys took 
advantage of this fact, creating a very un- 
comfortable situation for the principal of 
the school, and giving the critics of the school 
city a fine opportunity to say: — "There, 
see what your school city does!" But the 
principal knew what he was doing. The right 
side gained ground every day. Finally the 
mayor, who was the worst cigarette smoker 
in the school, went into the meeting of the 
city council and asked for permission to 
speak. He said: "I have come here to 
speak about the cigarette law. You all 
know that I am the worst boy in the school 
about smoking cigarettes, but when we took 
the school city we promised to make right 
laws and enforce them. We know the ciga- 
rette law is right. If you will pass it, I for 
one will keep it, and I will try to make the 
rest do the same." The law was passed and at 
last report it had not been violated. The 
principal said that he felt many times re- 



146 A New Citizenship 

paid for the two weeks in which both his faith 
and patience had been so sorely tried, be- 
cause now the school had won for itself a 
moral victory which no amount of rigid 
discipline on his part could have achieved. 

"Haven't Chawed A Chew" 

Mr. T. D. Sensor, Assistant State Superin- 
tendent of Public Education of the State of 
New Jersey, while Supervising Principal in 
Pittsburgh, adopted the school republic in 
one of his large schools in a rolling mill dis- 
trict, inhabited by English and Irish mill men. 
Brawls were common in the district, not only 
among the men who regard themselves as 
natural enemies, but their families. When the 
boys and girls, as school citizens, made laws 
and enforced them in the interest of order 
and good fellowship, the fighting among the 
young people ceased at once and the condi- 
tions among the older people gradually im- 
proved. 

The children legislated against the use of 
tobacco, and cigarette smoking, which was 
prevalent, stopped then and there, but some 
weeks afterward a boy was arrested for chew- 
ing tobacco. He pleaded that the mayor 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 147 

chewed, and if the mayor could chew he 
could too. The boy judge asked the mayor 
who was in court, if it were true, and he re- 
plied: "I used to chew, but I haven't 
chawed a chew since I was elected mayor.' ' 
The defendant gladly agreed not to chew to- 
bacco any more, and sentence was suspended. 

Japanese Boy Elected Governor in a 
New York City School 

Mr. Boyle, principal of Public School 69, 
in West 54th St., New York, invited me to 
organize thirteen rooms of his higher grades 
into a school state. The girls are in rooms by 
themselves and are not acquianted with the 
boys. This made elections difficult, until, 
by unanimous consent, they agreed to elect 
half of the officers from each side of the as- 
sembly, one side being boys and the other 
girls. Greatly to the surprise of the teachers 
and guests a Japanese boy was unanimously 
elected governor. 

An hour later I was with the principal 
organizing the boys of one room into a school 
city. Mr. Boyle asked the boys how they 
came to nominate and elect a Japanese boy 
to the highest office in their state. Hands 



148 A New Citizenship 

shot up over the whole room. The first boy 
called on answered, "Because he is very in- 
telligent." The next boy replied, "Not only 
because he is so intelligent, but he understands 
and appreciates our American institutions 
so thoroughly.' ' The third boy said, "I 
voted for him because I believe he is the very 
best one in the whole school for governor.' ' 

The next week I organized in the same 
building sixteen more rooms into another 
school state. That leaves fifteen primary 
rooms for a third school state. A girl was 
elected governor, and a Japanese boy was 
elected chief justice. They voted unani- 
mously to become citizens of the Children's 
International State, and the flag of the In- 
ternational State was then seen for the first 
time in any school and the new citizens were 
wild with enthusiasm. 

How Children Punish 

They may not inflict any punishment not 
approved by the school principal. 

In one school city the principal says that 
"the first arrests were for profanity in the 
school-yard and street. This was a surprise 
to the teachers, for they did not know such 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 149 

offenses were committed by their pupils. 
The judge, in each case, sentenced the offender 
not to speak to any person at recess time for 
two days. Every citizen seemed alert to 
see that the sentence was strictly complied 
with. Popular opinion was evidently against 
swearing. One arrest was for trying to pick 
a fight because of an unintentional provo- 
cation. The sentence was to copy neatly 
and carefully twenty times the first law of 
the School City, which is as follows : 

Do good to others whatever they do to you. 

A Wise Girl Judge 

This interesting question arose in a Massa- 
chusetts School Republic: A jury trial was 
to be held in which the plea was "not guilty." 
The mayor was so firmly convinced of the 
innocence of the accused that he wished to 
act as counsel for the defense. To this the 
prosecuting attorney and most of the citi- 
zens objected, on the ground that the mayor 
and his high office would be associated in the 
minds of the jurors and his plea would there- 
fore have undue weight and improper in- 
fluence. The principal of the school was 
appealed to, but could not decide. The mayor 



150 A New Citizenship 

appealed to a visitor, who had organized this 
school city a few months previous to this 
occurance, saying that he did not want to do 
anything improper or irregular, but he wish- 
ed very much to plead the case. Since there 
was nothing in their charter or in the laws 
passed by their city council to determine 
the question, he told them it could be set- 
tled eihter by action of the council, or, in 
the absence of such action, by decision of 
the court. The judge, who was an Italian 
girl of the 9th grade, said that, as truth and 
justice and the righting of the wrong were the 
objects of the court, any assistance which 
they might get from any source would be 
welcome, and the mayor was requested to 
give such assistance as he could. The teacher 
was enthusiastic in her praise of the dignity 
and firmness with which this girl always 
conducted her court. 

Dignity of The Court Upheld 

An illustration of how a wise teacher can 
uphold School Republic work was afforded 
in a certain court session. The boy complained 
of was the terror of his class. The policemen 
had been so thoroughly terrorized by him 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 151 

that they had refuse to arrest him for fear 
of physical consequences. The teacher had 
entered the complaint of disorderly conduct. 
The little terror pleaded not guilty, defied the 
teacher and the court, and in bullying tones 
declared that the chief of police and several 
other members of his class would testify 
that he had not done that which everyone in 
the room knew that he had done. The judge 
was a smaller boy than the terror and a 
member of the same class. He was mani- 
festly afraid of the culprit. He scratched his 
leg nervously and his face turned white as 
he realized that he must make a decision, 
but, gritting his teeth and summoning all 
the courage he possessed, he said: "I find 
you guilty and you must write an apology to 
the teacher before you can return to your 
work." The little terror threw a glance at 
the judge full of meaning as to his intentions 
to have revenge. Then the teacher sprang 
to her feet and said, "I want to say here 
for the protection of this judge that if the 
decision of the court had been anything less, 
I should have told the judge that he had made 
an error in judgment, and he must correct it, 
just as if he had gotten false results in a 



152 A New Citizenship 

problem in arithmetic. When a judge whom 
you have elected renders a decision and it is 
approved by the school authority appointed 
by the board of education, it is not only the 
duty of everyone of you young citizens to see 
that his decree is carried into execution and 
that he is protected, but it is the duty of the 
school board and all the higher authorities 
of the city and state. This is not a play 
government; it is part of the system of our 
great American Republic." 

The courage of that judge was not lost; 
it spread to the rest of the class. The little 
terror did not punch the judge. He found 
that it was too big a contract. The teacher's 
protection may have been valuable, but the 
contagion of a moral victory in self-govern- 
ment saved the day. 

How 4,200 Pupils In a Publc School 
Govern Themselves 

As seen by a member of the staff of the 
New York Herald. 

"Hear ye! hear ye! hear ye! All those 
having business at this court draw near and 
give their attention; let all others depart." 

These words were not droned out, as is 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 153 

often the case in other courts, but were de- 
livered by the clerk in clear, sharp, and yet 
dignified tones that struck terror into the 
hearts of the prisoners who were waiting trial. 
Well might they tremble, for there was scarce- 
ly one of them who was not guilty. It is 
indeed seldom that charges are made before 
this tribunal unless they are well founded. 
And the prisoners also knew full well that 
justice would be done. Neither oratory nor 
subterfuge of counsel, nor social position, nor 
wealth could save them from just punish- 
ment if the evidence clearly proved their 
guilt. For this is the State Court of Public 
School No. 109, at Dumont Avenue and 
Powell Street, Brooklyn. 

There the laws are made by the boy and girl 
citizens of the school cities and school state 
and are administered by the city and state 
officials. In the school state laws are made 
to be observed and not broken. What may 
seem strange to the many persons who have 
not investigated the subject is the fact that 
they are much less frequently broken when 
made and enforced by the school citizens 
than when made and enforced by the princi- 
pals and teachers. 



154 A New Citizenship 

That is why the culprits shifted about un- 
easily during the formalities of opening the 
court session, for there were so few of them 
out of a student body of more than 4,000 
that they already stood disgraced even before 
pleading to the charges against them. Abe 
Diamon the sheriff, a thirteen-year old boy, 
whose face fairly beamed with good nature, 
handed to the fourteen-year-old clerk several 
documents, including warrants, subpoenas, 
and other papers showing that sentences 
which had previously been pronounced, had 
been duly executed. After scrutinizing the 
writs the clerk passed them up to the chief 
judge, who signed them. 

"State against David Toborisky, stand and 
come forward.' ' 

A sheriff from one of the cities, composed 
of the pupils of one class, led a meek looking 
culprit to the bar. The judge took the 
warrant from the clerk's hands and said: 
"David Toborisky, you are charged with a 
serious offence — that of disturbing the peace 
of your school city by knocking a grammar, an 
arithmetic, and a geography out of the hands 
of one Philip Cohen on Monday at three 
o'clock in the afternoon in front of this school. 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 155 

You have heard the charge ; what do you plead, 
guilty or not guilty?' ' 

Thoroughly frightened, the little defendant 
murmured, " Guilty.' ' 

"Have you anything to say why sentence 
should not be pronounced against you?" 
inquired the judge. The prisoner had nothing 
to say. The presiding judge conferred with 
his two colleagues for a few seconds and then 
announced his decision. 

"David Toborisky, I find you guilty. This, 
however, being your first offence, the court 
is inclined to be lenient with you. On Mon- 
day morning next you will apologize to 
Philip Cohen for knocking his books out of 
his arms. Sheriff, remove the defendant." 

This case being disposed of, the sheriff 
withdrew, the convicted boy following at 
his heels. Ever since then the latter has been 
a model pupil. 

In the case of the State against Jacob Paw- 
lotsky the indictment showed three distinct 
counts. First, that while passing from room 
to room after the conclusion of the science 
lesson he began to jig; second, that he spoke 
while his teacher was writing on the black- 
board; third, that when the city or class 



156 A New Citizenship 

policeman threatened to arrest him he di- 
rected profane language at that official. At 
an inquest, held in the judge's chambers 
before the trial, it had been learned that 
Pawlotsky was a chronic law breaker. Neither 
his teacher nor any of his classmates has 
anything good to say of him. Accordingly, he 
was advised to plead guilty, "in order," as the 
judge remarked, "to save the time of the court." 

Pawlotsky had no witnesses, and, realizing 
his plight, did plead guilty. In answer to 
the judge's query as to what he had to say 
why sentence should not be imposed, a note 
from Pawlotsky's teacher was produced. It 
was as follows : 
"To the State Court of Public School No. 109 : 

"Since the beginning of the term Jacob 
Pawlotsky has behaved very badly. His 
mark in deportment is C. But last Monday 
he was served with a warrant to attend court. 
Since then, I am glad to say, he has im- 
proved wonderfully. In view of this fact, I 
respectfully petition Your Honor to be clem- 
ent toward him. Respectfully submitted, 

J. Rooney, Teacher." 

Again the judge conferred with his two 
associates. Then he said: — "Jacob Paw- 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 157 

lotsky, as you have pleaded guilty at the insti- 
gation of the Court, I suspend sentence on 
the first charge. Whereas your teacher has 
spoken well of your conduct in the class room 
during the last week and in order that you 
may continue to improve, I dismiss the second 
count. The third charge, however, is a very 
serious one. That your conduct may not 
be repeated and to impress upon the citizens 
of this school state that they must honor 
and obey the officers of this court, I sentence 
you to stand up in the assembly hall next 
Monday morning and apologize to the officer 
whom you insulted." 

Pawlotsky, with drooping head and burn- 
ing cheeks, was led away by the Sheriff, but 
ever since that day he has been one of the 
best behaved boys in the school, and he has 
so far regained the respect and confidence of 
his fellow citizens that some day he may be 
elected to office. 

Cases brought before this court include 
every violation of the rules applicable to a 
public school, all of which have been incorpo- 
rated in the statutes of the school state. 
Following is a list that shows the character 
of most of the offenses dealt with. It is 



158 A New Citizenship 

taken from the court calendar for the weekly- 
session of June 12, names of the defendants, 
complainants, and witness being omitted: 
Resisting an officer, striking a boy with a 
ruler, cheating in a geography test, pushing 
a boy out of line, shouting "fire" during a 
fire drill, disobeying the mayor, disturbing 
the class when the teacher was out of the room, 
writing on a desk, arguing with a teacher. 

Sentences are as varied as the crimes. A 
penalty sometimes imposed is the giving of 
demerit marks. Ten or more demerit marks 
in a month means a deduction in his standing 
in all studies. One boy constantly misbe- 
haved and absolutely ignored the city and 
State officers and the court warrants, until 
his teacher made it clear to him that by de- 
merit marks being imposed he would lose in 
his studies, which might affect his graduation. 
Thoroughly frightened at such a prospect, he 
has since been careful to obey the state laws 
and recognize the authority of the court. 

Another form of punishment is to sentence 
a boy to spend half an hour or an hour, ac- 
cording to the gravity of the offence, every 
afternoon for a week in the principal's room 
after school. One of the most severe senten- 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 159 

ces is a public reprimand in the assembly 
room. This was resorted to several months 
ago in the case of an old and apparently in- 
corrigible offender. The five or six hundred 
children gathered in the room were told that 
during the last month the convicted boy had 
violated nearly every law of the school state 
and his school city and that he was not a 
desirable citizen. The rebuke caused a great 
sensation among the pupils and the young 
culprit was utterly downcast for probably 
the first time in his life. But he now has the 
highest mark in deportment. 

Remarkable results have been obtained 
through the state court of school No. 109. 
Of course the court is only one branch of the 
school state. The latter was organized by 
Mr. Wilson L. Gill. Mr. Gill, who is the 
founder of the school republic, as adopted in 
many parts of the world, and of which the 
school state and school city are forms, ex- 
plained in an article in the New York Herald 
recently the aims and objects of his system of 
school government. Lack of space prevented 
him from giving a detailed description of 
how any particular school state is conducted. 
School No. 109 affords an excellent example. 



160 A New Citizenship 

This school is divided into a boys' depart- 
ment and a girls' department, each being 
under a different principal, although both are 
in the same building. There are about 2,200 
pupils, forty-eight classes, and fifty-three 
teachers in the boys' department. Dr. Os- 
wald Schlockow is the principal. In the girls' 
department there are about two thousand 
pupils, forty-one classes and forty-five teachers 
Mrs. M. Q. Led with is the principal. When 
theMcCabe School State, it being named after 
the supervisor of the district, was organized 
by Mr. Gill the conduct of the children was 
especially poor. The teachers were in de- 
spair. Several days ago both principals re- 
ported that they had comparatively no trouble 
with the children. 

Boys and girls being confined to separate 
wings of the building, there are two sets of 
officers. The boys' legislature is called the 
House of Representatives, while the girls' 
is called the Senate. All legislation for the 
school state must be passed by both bodies 
and signed by both governors. This plan 
equally divides the authority between the 
boys and girls and the responsibility of see- 
ing that the laws are not broken. Every law, 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 161 

after being passed by the House and the 
Senate and signed by the two governors, is 
sent to the principals for their approval. 

Here are some of the laws enacted soon 
after the McCabe school State was organized : 

"Resolved, by the citizens of the McCabe 
School State, in the Legislature assembled: 

"That all text books be covered by October 
20, 1907. 

"That expectorating on the premises of 
the school is prohibited. 

"That the Secretary of State shall announce 
all laws in the assembly room at the first 
assembly after they are approved by the 
principals. 

"That the mayors of the school cities shall 
be responsible for the execution of the laws 
in their respective cities and that in the ab- 
sence of the mayor, the sheriff shall assume 
charge. 

"That no citizen shall be permitted to 
hold more than one office at a time. 

"That the general school regulations now 
in force shall remain so until repealed or 
modified by law. 

"That the mayors shall be responsible for 
the conduct of the citizens of their respec- 



162 A New Citizenship 

tive cities when going home at dismissals. 

"That no races shall be run on any street 
near the school between twelve o'clock and 
one o'clock in the afternoon. 

"That no citizen of the school state shall 
play any game near the school building be- 
tween the hours of eight o'clock and nine 
o'clock in the morning and twelve o'clock noon 
and one o'clock in the afternoon or three and 
half-past three o'clock in the afternoon. 

"That the name of this school state shall 
be "The McCabe School State." 

"That the councilman of each ward shall 
look in each desk of his ward after three 
o'clock in the afternoon to collect books 
left there. 

"That the following law be repealed: 

"That no games shall be played on any street 
near the school building between the hours of 
eight and nine o'clock in the morning, twelve 
o'clock noon and one o'clock and three and 
half-past three o'clock in the afternoon." 

Sessions of the Senate and the House of 
Representatives are held once a week. They 
are well conducted; in fact, there is probably 
no legislative body in the country conducted 
with greater dignity nor where parliamentary 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 163 

rules are more closely observed. The boys' 
court also is in session every week, as is 
also the girls' court when there are any cases 
on the calendar. But since the organization 
of the McCabe School State the girls seldom 
violate any of its laws. The boys' court is 
attended at every session by about eight 
hundred pupils, who appear to be greatly 
interested in the form of court procedure, as 
well as in specific cases. The principal at- 
tends every session of the House of Repre- 
sentatives, so that when called upon he may 
give to the boys any needed advice. One of 
the teachers who is also a lawyer, performs 
similar service at the sessions of the boys' 
court. 

The Indian School Cities at 
Fort Lapwai Sanitorium 

Extract from letter written by the head 
nurse and matron, Deaconess Mary Eliza- 
beth (Miss Metzler). 

Can you imagine our pleasure when Su- 
pervisor Wilson L. Gill came to us just before 
Christmas and organized the boys and girls 
of the Sanitorium into two "Cities" with 
City government? The idea of this training 
in citizenship is not new to all of our children, 



164 A New Citizenship 

they having heard of it from Doctor Gill last 
spring, but it's intelligent application in every- 
day affairs is entirely novel to me, with this 
exception, that ever since coming here four 
months ago a small measure of self-govern- 
ment has been tried with the boys. My letters 
to you have told the very good results. 
However, we had reached the point when a 
woman's word and way needed the backing 
of a man's. Boys especially want the other 
"fellow," one of themselves, to "say so." 
Doctor Gill "said so." Then this preliminary 
training established receptivity for the fur- 
ther development brought us by Doctor Gill. 
Just as the children finished their Chirst- 
mas dinner, Doctor Gill, accompanied by 
Supervisor Baker and several visitors from 
the State Normal School, came into the 
dining room. For an hour and a half he held 
the intense interest of everybody. In such 
language as the children could readily under- 
stand, he spoke of our country, its aims and 
ambitions, and its status among other world 
powers. He explained its political system as 
it was intended to be, largely in the hands of 
trained and educated men. Then he told us 
of the existing situation in many of our cities 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 165 

and rural communities dominated by the 
1 'bosses.' ' The remedy lies in the training of our 
children as good, practical, active citizens, and 
in this the Indians should have their share. 

He told how this could be begun at once, 
that the Sanitorium could be a democracy 
and the boys and girls its citizens. When the 
children had fully grasped this and its mean- 
ing, Doctor Gill put it to vote, whether they 
desired such an organization. There was not 
a dissenting voice. Then the offices and duties 
of Mayor, Council and Council President, 
Court and Judge, Clerks of the City, Council 
and Court were carefully reviewed. Doctor 
Gill by actual incidents of similar organiza- 
tions illustrated his points. After this he 
asked the boys to nominate one of their 
number for mayor, making a similar request 
of the girls. The nominating showed excel- 
lent discrimination in the selection of the 
candidates. Both candidates were elected 
unanimously. The same procedure was fol- 
lowed for the other offices, presidents of the 
councils, judges, and three clerks for each city. 

The boys and girls live in separate build- 
ings, and it seemed best for several reasons 
that each group should have its own "City," 



166 A New Citizenship 

After the election, Doctor Gill asked the offi- 
cers to come before the assembly and he then 
administered the "Oath of Office." 

The spontaneous interest of the children 
was very marked, and that this interest was 
not assumed merely for the occasion was 
proved by the eagerness afterward with which 
the children came to me, asking, "how can we 
be good citizens of the city that Doctor Gill 
told us about?" 

Understanding quite well that this "self- 
government" training for "citizenship" is 
not intended as an organization to be let 
loose in the hands of children, we (the nurse 
in charge of the girls, and I, as head nurse, 
and in immedaite charge of the boys) explain- 
ed still further all that Doctor Gill had or- 
ganized, and how, in this organization, we 
were the "advisors" to teach the children 
what to do and how. We would be present 
at all meetings to help and instruct where 
necessary (often suggestion is all that is 
needed to set a girl or boy on the track of 
intelligent procedure). 

We want to "do things right." Boys es- 
pecially respond to law and order justly 
administered, and to technical terms and 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 167 

parliamentary usages. Already the effect of 
a distinct organization is quite pronounced, 
in small things as well as those more impor- 
tant. It does not matter much if a boy does 
track mud indoors; maybe no one sees him 
and some other fellow will clean it up. With 
a "City" to keep clean and sanitary, that 
each "citizen" may have all the benefit of 
healthful surroundings, it is up to each 
"citizen" to do his share, and that is quite a 
different matter; and one which prevents all 
that is not wholesome and clean, rather than 
provides a remedy afterward. Even children 
can see this. 

A specific instance of the helpfulness of the 
organization occurred when one of the boys 
(who previously required men and the guard- 
house to handle him) was guilty of serious 
misconduct in the dining room. A special 
session of the Boys' City Court was called, 
and, so far as circumstances and environ- 
ment permitted, court technicalities and order 
were obserevd, I, of course, coaching the 
officers to correct terms, the lawyers to in- 
telligent questioning and the witnesses to 
truthful testimony. Here it became necessary, 
in order to get testimony at all, to carefully 



168 A New Citizenship 

explain the difference between tale telling 
and stating necessary facts in order to help 
the offender to do better, and protect the 
rights of other citizens. 

The court procedure developed the fact 
that another boy was guilty of the same mis- 
demeanor, with the additional offence of 
lying, so he also came up for trial. After all 
testimony was in, the offenders were allowed 
to plead for themselves, and the case was pre- 
sented to the Court. In this instance a 
regular jury was not appointed, but the Judge 
appointed four advisors. They retired to 
my private office to decide upon a just punish- 
ment. As their teacher and advisor it was 
my business to be present at their delibera- 
tions and aid them if necessary to arrive at 
a logical and just conclusion, but I did not 
find it necessary to give one hint. The sen- 
tences imposed were excellent. I could not 
have done better, perhaps not so well. Both 
boys, for the dining room misconduct, were 
to be isolated at separate tables in the dining 
room until they had proved their fitness to 
eat with gentlemen. For lying, the one boy 
had the additional sentence of chopping wood 
daily for a week, one hour of his play time 



A Long Chapter of Short Stories 169 

each day. This latter was especially apropos, 
as the boy in question is remarkably lazy in 
proportion to his health. 

Both boys on trial sat quietly through the 
proceedings. After the first embarrassment 
of things which seemed a trifle funny was over- 
come, a certain wholesome awe for the court 
pervaded the atmosphere. They heard their 
sentence with no more protest than faces 
somewhat pale. They have acted toward the 
judge and witnesses as though nothing had 
happened, and have gone to their isolated 
meals and wood chopping without a word of 
protest or any reminder from me. 

The good to the children themselves, now 
and for their future, is the chief question. 
But can you understand what it means to a 
woman in the government of boys? And this 
is only our beginning. We mean to "grow," 
branch out on city lines, and adopt laws 
especially applicable to the development of 
a good Sanitorium. 

There will be "Street Commissioners" who 
will take charge of the halls and a "Park 
Commissioner" who will see to the yard, and, 
oh, ever so many things that will make duties, 
irksome in themselves, resolve into more or 



170 A New Citizenship 

less fun and pleasure under the incentive of 
being good citizens in a good city. 

Another thing of interest and value is that 
a careful record of all proceedings is to be 
kept. The record of the court trial was 
copied, and the boys became very grave upon 
realizing that these records were available 
for future reference. The effect on the copy- 
ing clerk has been very good. To write a 
thing always peculiarly impresses it. This 
boy has been noticably thoughtful since, and 
anxious that others, as well as himself, should 
observe the Sanitorium regulations. 

Whatever the future result may be, we are 
"hoping great things." When the basic 
principle of a government is to do only that 
which you would have the other fellow do to 
you and never to do what you would not have 
him do, certainly good must follow. Don't 
you believe so? 

Almost all children, particularly boys, and 
especially Indians, have a strong innate 
sense of justice. A wise guidance of them in 
participating in the affairs of government 
must surely train them for a better and more 
helpful adult citizenship. 



CHAPTER X. 

Appeal To Citizens and Legislators 

HAVING found a successful method for 
moral and civic training, there still 
remains the problem of reaping from 
it the greatest possible good. Of course it is 
evident this must be accomplished through 
the proper use of it by all schools for young 
people. But how are we to bring about its 
general adoption and proper use? That is 
quite another question. 

For sixteen years educators have been 
aware of the fact that there is a laboratory 
method of teaching the art of right living, 
including citizenship. Judging from the his- 
tory of educational methods, we seem to be 
justified in believing that we cannot reason- 
ably look to them to make a general appli- 
cation of any new method in less than from 
fifty years to a century. In fact they are not 
in a position to adopt a new educational 
method without help from the people and at 

171 



172 A New Citizenship 

least so much of the government as a local 
school board. Of course they can delay the 
adoption of a new method, and generally do, 
for they are very conservative, in spite of the 
fact that there are, in the aggregate, a good 
many progressives among them. However, 
when they are employed to do a given task, 
they generally do it as best they know how. 

Is it not evident that our appeal must be 
made to the people and to their representa- 
tives in Congress and in the state legisla- 
tures? If so, we know to whom to appeal, 
But how are we to do it? 

We must enlist the personal interest and 
co-operation of the people to secure provi- 
sion for the introduction of the method and 
such supervision as will insure the use of it 
in the right spirit and with greatest efficiency. 
We must look also to the people to encourage 
the children and their teachers in this work 
for moral training and good government, and 
to help them to arouse and maintain their 
enthusiasm. 

As fast as friends are won their names should 
be enrolled, and every friend should make 
reasonable endeavor to enlist others. This 
can be done through membership in an 



Appeal to Citizens and Legislators 173 

association, which is for the specific purpose 
of advancing the cause. By means of the 
association, every member can be kept in 
touch with the headquarters and be informed 
through its periodical of everything of im- 
portance in relation to the movement. 

This matter is one of so much importance 
to every community and every person in it, 
that when the way is made clear how they may 
do it, many societies, patriotic, civic, and 
others that are working for better moral and 
civic conditions, will gladly co-operate to 
build up a large organization to work for moral 
and civic training. We must have a large popu- 
lar support before we can reasonably hope 
for all the legislation that is desirable. 

In our appeal to legislators, we must make 
a brief statement of what we wish to ac- 
complish and the cost of it, and then ask them 
to authorize the work and make such ap- 
propriation for its maintenance as may be 
necessary. This appeal may be in some such 
words as the following : 

To Legislators: Based on the following 
statements, we ask you to make authorita- 
tive provision for civic and social training of 
the youth of our country. 



174 A New Citizenship 

A laboratory method for use in schools 
has been invented for teaching morality, in- 
cluding citizenship. It has been tested by the 
Unietd States Government, found eminent- 
ly successful for its purpose and has been 
officially approved and endorsed by several 
branches of the Government. It accomplish- 
es the following results : 

It reduces truancy, which is a serious prob- 
lem, from one end of our country to the other. 

It relieves teachers and other adult school 
officers of police duty, which consumes much 
of the time and energy needed for giving 
instruction. 

It constructs a new and effective means 
for protecting school and all other public 
and private property. 

It adds efficiency to all school work and 
zest and decency to play. 

It gives children the spirit and practice of 
citizenship. 

It teaches kindness, friendliness, loyalty, jus- 
tice, honesty and hatred of graft, thus bringing 
about better moral, social and civic conditions. 

It can promote, through the schools of all 
countries, universal peace and good -will, by 
practice as well as academically. 



Appeal to Citizens and Legislators 175 

To accomplish these ends, the interests 
and co-operation of children must be engaged. 
They must be taught the principles of right 
living and of democratic government, to 
legislate, to carry their laws into execution, to 
adjudicate difficulties and elect officers, to 
assume the responsibility for school attend- 
ance and for the conduct of all the pupils. 

One hour of school time a week should be 
allowed for this work of moral and civic 
training. Teachers and all adults concerned 
should exhibit interest in the children's efforts 
and give them all the encouragement that 
children need to keep them up to their best 
efforts, intellgient, enthusiastic, and authori- 
tative supervision is needed to bring about 
the desired results. 

National legislation should be had, first to 
authorize the introduction of the method into 
all schools over which the Government has 
control, second to provide for its proper intro- 
duction and supervision, and third that such 
encouragement and aid as the Government 
gives to improve agricultural conditions 
throughout the country shall be given to im- 
prove the moral and civic conditions, as a mat- 
ter of internal defense, peace, and prosperity. 



176 A New Citizenship 

Following is a suggestion for national and 
state legislation: 

A BILL 

Providing for Civic Training in All Schools 
which are under the control of the United 
States Government. 

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of 
Representatives of the United States of 
America in Congress assembled: That all 
school authorities under the control of the 
United States Government shall introduce 
and maintain in all schools within their 
jurisdiction, training in citizenship by or- 
ganizing the pupils of each school room under 
some form of republican government, and 
training them to exercise the privileges and 
discharge the responsibilities of democracy 
honestly, honorably and efficiently; maintain- 
ing order, cleanliness and health; and co- 
operating among themselves and with the 
government of adults for good purposes, 
using principles, plans and nomenclature in 
harmony with those of American government ; 
and they shall provide therefor at least one 
hour's instruction each week for all children. 
This work shall be directed by a supervisor 




Large boys and girls, Carson (Nevada) Indian School. They have 

done some good work as citizens and officers of 

their school republic. See page 203. 




Little boys and girls, Carson Indian School. They elect civic of- 
ficers; maintain order in and out of school hours; in small groups elect 
daily their own teachers, each child having learned to be "teacher." The 
adult teacher goes from group to group encouraging and helping. The 
results for years have been excellent. 



Appeal to Citizens and Legislators 177 

to be appointed by the President and who 
shall receive a salary of thousand 

dollars per annum. The said supervisor shall 
appoint a corps of assistants, each of whom 
shall receive a salary not to exceed three 
thousand dollars, one of whom shall be a 
special disbursing agent of the United States 
Treasury, with authority to pay by vouchers 
said salaries and all expenses of said work; 
and there is hereby appropriated for super- 
vision, correspondence, printed instructions, 
travelling and other expenses for the purpose 
of this act, for the fiscal year beginning July 
1st, 1913, the sum of thousand 

dollars from any moneys in the Treasury of 
the United States not otherwise appropriated. 



A division for moral and civic training 
could be added to the Bureau of Education. 



CHAPTER XL 

General Summary 

RIGHT living is an art, and cannot be 
learned efficiently except as other 
arts are learned, which is by practice 
of the art itself under instruction of a master 
of the art. 

That sort of practice under instruction, 
as already noted, is called the "laboratory 
method." The ordinary method of teaching 
morality, which is called ' 'academic,' ' and 
has been used inadequately through the centu- 
ries and is in general use now throughout 
the world, depends upon lectures, speeches, 
sermons, books, songs, and recitations, and 
mainly upon memorizing. In one decade, 
since a public school system has been es- 
tablished in many countries, greater results 
can be gotten throughout the world by the 
laboratory method than have been gotten in 
two thousand years by the academic. 

178 



General Summary 179 

Right living and good citizenship are one 
and the same thing. If a person thinks they 
are two things, he will be unable to tell where 
one leaves off and the other begins. 

The only place, under present conditions 
throughout the civilized world, in which the 
masses of the people can be taught right 
living or citizenship is in the schools, and these 
have not used the method by which the art 
can be taught. Consequently there are com- 
paratively few persons in the world who have 
thoroughly learned the art, and as entirely 
successful democracy is dependent upon its 
application by persons who live approximately 
right, it has been, speaking mildly, to a large 
degree a failure in many parts of our country. 
The only complete remedy for this is to use 
the laboratory method in the schools for 
teaching morality or right living. 

Right living, correct citizenship, highest 
morality, perfect democracy — all the same 
thing — cannot exist unless based on the 
scientific principle which is expressed in the 
Golden Rule or in the words, "Do good to 
others, whatever they do to you." 

The laboratory method of teaching right 
living, including citizenship, was invented in 



180 A New Citizenship 

1897, when a systematized plan was made and 
used successfully with eleven hundred immi- 
grant children in New York City. The ages 
of the children were from five to fifteen years. 

The frame work of this plan was that of 
a democratic republic in the form of a munici- 
pality. The little republic was called the 
"School City" and the system as developed 
is called the School Republic. 

The method may be applied by the use of 
any one of an endless number of variations of 
the plan, without departing in the slightest 
from the right principles of government. 
Whenever teachers enter into the spirit of 
the method, the pupils will develop the 
plans according to the conditions of the com- 
munity in which they live. 

Whether a school consist of one or of many 
rooms, one room is considered the unit of 
organization and has all the powers of govern- 
ment ; legislative, executive, and judicial. The 
pupils are taught to make laws, carry them 
into execution, to adjudicate difficulties, and 
to elect officers. The teacher is not a citi- 
zen or officer, but teacher, in this as in arith- 
metic, helping the pupils to be independent in 
sovling their daily social and civic problems, 



General Summary 181 

as in solving the problems in arithmetic. 
This is real, not play government, though 
it has all the pleasure and exhilaration of 
good team play. This government may be in 
the form of a village, town, county, or city. 
Several school-room governments may be 
joined in a state, and several states in a 
federal government. In a boarding school, 
each dormitory may be a state, and the 
academic schoolhouse the federal district, 
with each schoolroom a village, town, or 
city. In a school in which there is no "home 
room" but where the pupils go from room to 
room for recitation, each grade may be 
organized as a unit, or each group of twenty 
to forty that have to be kept together for 
any particular purpose may constitute a 
unit of organization. 

The School Republic is not a thing which 
will "work" itself or which the children, 
unaided by the teachers, can use to advantage. 
It must be treated as mathematics or other 
school work is treated. 

The School Republic is true, faithful, and 
kindly citizenship brought to the individual 
early enough in his life to enable him to in- 
corporate it into his habits and character. 



182 A New Citizenship 

It is based on the spirit and plan of the 
Declaration of Independence and Constitu- 
tion of the United States and the practice, 
rather than the mere knowledge, of the Golden 
Rule. It is Christianity systematically ap- 
plied by children to their daily life, by means 
of democracy, to aid them to develop fine, 
strong, best characters. 

To preaching and academic teaching of 
morals and civil government, is added, under 
instruction, daily and constant practice of the 
art of right living, including faithful citizen- 
ship. 

Its plan is very elastic, being simple for 
those who wish to use but a few features. 
Other features may be added from time to 
time when wanted. The spirit but not the 
plan is the same in a kindergarten and in a 
college, or, if the same general plan is used, 
it of course would be more fully developed 
in the college. 

It educates in social relations. 

It trains not by precept, but by action. 

It educates by employing the normal and 
personal activities of the student for educa- 
tion. 

It develops by imposing responsibility. 



General Summary 183 

It systematically imposes responsibility 
which raises the individuals who accept it to 
a higher moral and civic plane. 

It puts into the individual who is thus 
raised, the desire and ability to lift all his 
associates to the same level. 

The School Republic, in large measure, 
replaces repression of wrong-doing by ex- 
pression of that which is right. 

There are no spies or monitors appointed 
by the teacher. In some School Republics 
there are no police, for every citizen is plegded 
to obey the laws and to insist that all the rest 
shall do the same. Where there are police, 
their chief function is to help those who need 
help and to make things go right; it is not to 
get people into trouble and make arrests. 

It is an enlightened public opinion with 
power to stamp out all wrong-doing in a legal 
and orderly way, and to encourage right 
thought and action. It can easily make an 
end of hazing and all other forms of anarchy 
in schools and colleges. 

It is the best means for securing obedience 
and for preparing children for self-government. 
Therefore, it requires no special course of coer- 
cion or other preparatory training to precede it. 



184 A New Citizenship 

It does not draw a pupil's attention from 
his other school work, but on the contrary by 
improving his spirit increases his interest in 
his studies and all school affairs. 

It makes an end of truancy, cigarette 
smoking, swearing and other bad language, 
lewdness, destruction of property, tattling, 
and other forms of illegal gossip. 

It enables the young citizen to distinguish 
between tattling and honorable testimony and 
exposing of wrong for the purpose of checking 
wrong doing. 

It develops personal independence and the 
habit of defending his own as well as other's 
rights. 

It develops co-operation for every good 
purpose. 

It develops the fact that more than ninety 
per cent, of normal boys and girls prefer right 
conditions to wrong, and it gives them the 
means to express this, to show their indigna- 
nation for wrong and to discourage all wrong 
doing. Thereby the wrong-doer realizes that 
he has no sympathy or covert encouragement, 
but only condemnation from the almost 
unanimous majority. He is almost sure to 
seek consolation in doing what is right. 



General Summary 185 

It furnishes a means, proved to be thoroughly 
successful, for constantly incorporating the 
practice of the Golden Rule into the ordinary 
daily habits and character of the whole body 
of pupils in the school. This is a decided 
improvemnet on the simple memorizing of 
moral precepts. 

The improved spirit lightens the cares of 
both teachers and pupils. 

It improves the personal morals of the 
students. 

All children are helped to construct good 
character for themselves. 

Bad children are put on the right track 
morally and as citizens. 

It reduces the number of petty offenses 
which call for punishment. 

It appeals not to fear of punishment but 
to honor and care for the common welfare. 

The childs own conscience is trained and 
given charge of his conduct, in place of the 
ordinary endeavor to subject him to the 
teacher's conscience. 

It increases and gives valuable support to 
self respect. 

"It develops a sense of manliness, woman- 
liness, independence, and personal responsi- 



186 A New Citizenship 

bility, as nothing else has done, and certainly 
in a manner that mere oral instruction can 
never do." — Dr. Charles M. Buchanon. 

It develops in the young people honor, re- 
spect, and obedience to laws of their own 
making, and hence to all properly constituted 
authority, such as of parents, teachers, city 
ordinances, state laws, etc. 

It exerts a beneficial influence upon the 
children when out of school. 

The joys of childhood may be multiplied. 

Play apparatus may be increased with 
little or no public expense. 

Greater value and pleasure can be derived 
from play apparatus. 

Public and private property are protected 
instead of being injured by ruthless boys. 

Public and private supplies are used with 
greater economy. 

Two or three times as many pupils may be 
taught by one teacher, with increased good 
results for each individual child. 

The system may be used to teach every 
pupil the art of teaching, the pupils electing 
from their own number teachers to serve for 
a day or longer time, thereby increasing the 
pupils' interest, eradicating laggardism and 



General Summary 187 

dishonesty in recitations, and enabling the 
adult teacher to instruct a larger number of 
pupils, either in one body or in groups. This 
can be done without extra expenditure of 
money or time. 

Children in grammar grades, when they 
have an organization by which to protect 
themselves, are able to prevent unclean talk 
and the circulation of such pictures, notes, 
and printed matter as lead to disaster in high 
school years, and in all grades they can and do 
protect themselves from wrongs of which the 
teachers know nothing, or know only after 
the wrong is done. 

It cultivates in the students a judicial 
frame of mind. 

It tends to preclude snap judgments by 
establishing a system of judgments upon 
evidence. 

It removes causes of friction between teachers 
and pupils and develops most cordial relations. 

It lifts a child from the plane of servility to 
one of friendship with the teachers. 

It produces better order and discipline in 
the schools. 

The ordinary discipline of the school is 
made educational. 



188 A New Citizenship 

It furnishes "a new motive for discipline, to 
the end that all the school's activities may be 
made educational." 

It releases for constructive work much of the 
teacher's energy ordinarily consumed in police 
duty. 

Teachers may be relieved of police duty in 
the halls and playground. 

The friction of school life and the teacher's 
nervous strain being relieved, she can give 
more time and force to the work of instruction. 

It gives the students an acquaintance with 
governmental forms. 

"It inculcates practical principles of civics 
totally different from the memorizing of dry- 
bones passages from the Constitution." 

It forms habits of good citizenship while the 
mind is plastic and open to the full force of the 
love of justice and free from the commercial 
motives, graft, and other influences that in 
later life so often interfere with the duties of 
citizenship. 

It prepares for future participation in the 
city, state, and the nation, a body of citizens 
who are informed as to their duties, trained 
in the practice of them, and imbued with the 
interests and purposes of a true public spirit. 



General Summary 189 

It takes nothing from the teachers' author- 
ity. It is an added authority under the guid- 
ance of the teachers. 

It requires no time in addition to that ordi- 
narily provided for moral and civic instruction. 

In those schools where time is not already 
provided for moral and civic instruction, it 
is desirable that from one to two hours a week 
should be alloted to School Republic work. 

It requires enthusiastic and judicious super- 
vision. When it "spreads" without this, it is 
apt to be misunderstood, misused and the 
cause damaged. 

In many cases the principal and teachers 
of a school, without asking any higher author- 
ity, can and do take up the School Republic 
method and experience nothing but pleasure 
and good results. 

In many other cases, the principal and some 
if not all the teachers desiring to use the 
method, cannot do so without embarrassment 
and courting failure, unless they have a posi- 
tive order from competent authority, which in 
those cases is very helpful and adds to the 
comfort of the work 

Many teachers not yet informed or even 
unfavorable to the use of the School Republic 



190 A New Citizenship 

method, when required by undoubted and 
competent authority to use it, have become suc- 
cessful users of the method and thankful for it. 

Mr. Louis P. Nash, headmaster or super- 
intendent of a large school district in Boston, 
after thirteen years' experience with the School 
Republic, in his own schools, wrote about May 
1st, 1913, and sums up the matter as follows: 

"My experience and observation of the 
School Republic is, that it is altogether useful 
and not at all harmful. 

"Its intellectual advantages are many. 

"It teaches the forms of Government. 

"It gives practice in conducting meetings, 
in voting, in carrying on elections, in usin 
victory or accepting defeat. 

"It teaches to weigh candidates, to conside 
duties, and the suitability of persons for places. 

"Its Moral advantages are more consider- 
able. 

"Officers learn to exercise authority over 
their fellows and equals, while citizens like- 
wise learn to recognize lawful rule; it culti- 
vates responsibility on both sides. 

"It brings out co-operation, which is espe- 
cially to be desired in a republic." 

The method is already used in many countries . 



General Summary 191 

It has been the subject of official investiga- 
tion by special commissioners of education 
from a number of countries in Europe, Asia, 
Africa and South America, and has been of- 
ficially authorized in several if not all of them. 

It is used in some schools in China, and can 
be made of inestimable value in developing 
the new republic. 

It can be made a most powerful factor in 
securing universal and permanent peace and 
friendship among nations. 

The method was adopted by the United 
States War Department for Cuba, by the 
Bureau of Indian Affairs for the Indians, and 
the United States Commissioner of Educa- 
tion for the schools under his authority. 

Whatever good has been done or may yet 
be done for Porto Rico and the Philippines, 
they cannot be adequately prepared for self 
government, except by means of this method 
in all of their schools and under thorough 
supervision. 

The responsibility in reference to this mat- 
ter should be assumed by the United States 
Congress and state legislatures. Friends of 
the cause should work with this end in view. 




Giant-strides, teeters, swings, etc., built at almost no cost by boys 
of board of public works, Carson Indian School Republic. 




Above: merry-go-round, constructed at large expense by Indian 
Bureau, out of repair and use for years; put in repair by boys as soon as 
organized in a republic. Below: teeters, swings, etc., built by boys of 
board of public works at almost no cost. 






A NEW CITIZENSHIP 



APPENDIX 



Prefatory Note : — 

The amount of testimony which has accumulated con- 
cerning the important results which have been gained by 
the use of the School Republic or laboratory method of moral 
and civic training is so large, and the limits of such a book as 
this are so small that it is embarrassing to pick out one from 
many equally fine and strong statements, and leave the rest 
unpublished. This, however, has had to be done in this 
Appendix, with the hope that much of that which remains 
may be published later. 



CONTENTS OF APPENDIX 

Chapter 

I. The School Republic promoted by the American 

Patriotic League 195 

II. Cuba, Alaska and Indian Schools; Major General 
Leonard Wood; Dr. P. P. Claxton, U. S. Com- 
missioner of Education; Letter from an Indian 
School 198 

III. Method used in Primary and Grammar Schools . 205 

IV. In a High School 211 

V. In a Normal School 216 

VI. Gold Medal and Diploma awarded; addresses by 
Mr. Louis E. Levy, Rev. Thomas R. Slicer, 
Rev. Dr. Charles Wood, Dr. Martin Brum- 
baugh ; letter from President Roosevelt 223 

VII. Banquet of Boston School Masters; addresses by 
Dr. Snedden, Mass. Commissioner of Educa- 
tion; Mr. H. R. Williams, Superintendent 
Wenham Schools; Mr. F. V. Thompson, 
Assistant Superintendent Boston Schools; Mr. 
James P. Munroe, Executive Director of 
"Boston 1915" 233 

VIII. Clergymen and Daughters of the American Revo- 
lution 241 

IX. Editorials: Paris Figaro, Heraldo de Madrid, 
Havana Post, Boston Common, Philadelphia 
Press, Philadelphia North American 244 

X. Brief Charter for School City 256 

XI. Brief Constitution for School State 259 

XII. Brief Constitution for Federal Republic 263 

XIII. Children's International State 266 



CHAPTER I 
THE AMERICAN PATRIOTIC LEAGUE. 

THIS society was chartered under law of Congress in 
1891 to promote the cause of civic education. It 
organized chapters throughout the United States to 
study citizenship and government. These were in connection 
with other societies, clubs, schools, churches and the Army 
and Navy. It published "Our Country," a magazine of 
instructions in civic matters, the literature being prepared 
by members of the advisory board. 

This work was continued until it led to the realization 
that it was but academic and that citizenship cannot be 
learned by academic means alone. These means must be 
supplemented by the actual practice of citizenship, and for 
the great mass of our people, this must be in the habit form- 
ing part of life, under instruction in the schools. 

An experiment was made in 1897 in a New York "East 
Side" school to test a plan for carrying this idea into practice. 
We organized eleven hundred foreign born children from five 
to fifteen years of age as citizens of a republic, taught them 
to make laws, to carry them into execution, to adjudicate 
difficulties and to elect officers. This experiment was thor- 
oughly successful, and is more fully described elsewhere in 
this book. Our resources did not admit of endeavors for 
both the academic and practical instruction and in 1901 the 
former gave way to the latter. 

Following is a list of the officers and members of the ad- 
visory board and life members from 1891 till the present: 

195 



196 



A New Citizenship — Appendix 



Henry Herschall Adams, 
Ralph Albertson, 
Charles Henry Arndt, 
Leonard P. Ayres, 
James A. Beaver, 
Elizabeth P. Bemis, 
Ludwig B. Bernstein, 
Alice M. Birney, 
Sarah Knowles Bolton, 
Francis M. Burdick, 
Alice Carter, 
Mrs. William M. Carter, 
John A. Cass, 
Francis E. Clark, 
John Lewis Clark, 
Grover Cleveland, 
John R. Commons, 
Thomas S. Crane, 
Bernard Cronson, 
R. Fulton Cutting, 
George Dewey, 
Mary Lowe Dickinson, 
James Mapes Dodge, 
William E. Dodge, 
Charles F. Dole, 
Patterson Du Bois, 
Dorman B. Eaton, 
John Eaton, 
Wm. H. P. Faunce, 
Ruford Franklin, 
Alden Freeman, 
Merril E. Gates, 
William A. Giles, 
Allis Bradford Gill, 
Herbert Richmond Gill, 
Mrs. John L. Gill, 
Wilson L. Gill, President, 
Arthur Goadby, 



E. P. Goodman, 
Frank J. Goodnow, 
Elizabeth B. Grannis, 
Simon Gratz, 
Luther H. Gulick, 
Alexander M. Hadden, 
Edward Everett Hale, 
Edward H. Hance, 
James H. Hamilton, 
Henry B. Hammond, 
Benjamin Harrison, 
Rutherford B. Hayes, 
John W. Heggeman, 
Esther Herrman, 
Walter L. Hervey, 
Abram S. Hewitt, 
Helen M. Hill, 
Richard Pearson Hobson, 
O. O. Howard, 
John Jay, 
Charles F. Jenkins, 
John Story Jenks, 
Wm. Bradford Jordan, 
W. W. Keene, 
Frederic R. Kellogg, 
George W. Kirchwey, 
Mrs. Elizabeth B. Kirkbride, 
Joseph Lamb, 
Henry M. Leipsiger, 
Louis Edward Levy, 
Samuel McC. Lindsay, 
Ben B. Lindsey, 
Mary A. Livermore, 
James MacAlister, 
Robert S. MacArthur, 
George D. Mackay, 
Milo R. Maltbie, 
La Salle A. Maynard, 



The American Patriotic League 



197 



John J. McCook, 
William McKinley, 
Father Thomas McMillan, 
Henry D. Metcalf, 
Levi P. Morton, 
P. V. N. Myers, 
John H. C. Nevius, 
Arthur E. Overbury, 
Nanette B. Paul, 
Mrs. Samuel R. Percy, 
Daniel T. Pierce, 
Gifford Pinchot, 
Overton W. Price, 
J. C. Pumpelly, 
W. S. Rainsford, 
E. O. Randall, 
Jacob A. Riis, 
Luis Munoz Rivera, 
William C. Robinson, 
Theodore Roosevelt, 
Wm. Jay Schieffelin, 
Oswald Schlockow, 
T. D. Sensor, 
Mary Seward, 
Theodore S. Seward, 
Albert Shaw, 
Eliot F. Shepard, 
Kate B. Sherwood, 



George H. Shibley, 
Thomas R. Slicer, 
Samuel Francis Smith, 
Matthew K. Sniffen, 
James Speyer, 
Joseph A. Steinmetz, 
Lyman Beecher Stowe, 
Isidor Straus, 
Josiah Strong, 
Wm. L. Strong, 
Herman B. Walker, 
Felix Warburg, 
George E. Waring, Jr., 
William Ives Washburn, 
Richard Welling, 
Herbert Welsh, 
D. B. Wesson, 
George Derby White, 
James T. White, 
Delos F. Wilcox, 
Elias Bunn Wilcox, 
Everett G. Willard, 
Stephen S. Wise, 
Leonard Wood, 
Mrs. Owen Wister, 
James Albert Woodburn, 
Clinton Rogers Woodruff, 
Mrs. Theodore G. Wormley, 



CHAPTER II 
CUBA, ALASKA AND INDIAN SCHOOLS 

THE United States Government, through several of 
its departments and bureaus has used the School 
Republic method of moral and civic training. The 
official reports, published by the Government, testify to 
the most satisfactory results. These reports are voluminous 
and intensely interesting, but the limits of this book do not 
admit of reproducing any of them here. 

The man who has had the largest official experience with 
this method is that renowned surgeon, scholar and soldier, 
the head of the United States Army, Major- General Leonard 
Wood, with whom rested the responsibility of cleaning Cuba, 
driving out the mosquetos and yellow fever, and thus pro- 
tecting the people of our Southern States from the annual 
threat of a yellow fever epidemic, which always came from 
the Cuban ports; of giving to the people who had been fight- 
ing for half a century for their freedom, a citizenship different 
from that which has been so much in evidence in Central 
America, which would keep the Island clean and free from 
periodical bloody revolutions. 

General Wood used the School Republic method, to give 
to the grown people of Cuba an illustration and understand- 
ing of citizenship by means of organizing every public school 
in the Island as a republic and training the children as citizens, 
responsible for the conditions of cleanliness, health, justice 
and honor in their neighborhoods. 

On the 10th of September, 1913, after the manuscript of 
this book was put into the printer's hands, General Wood 
wrote a letter to accompany some documents to be submitted 
to President Wilson. A copy of that letter is given here, 
though it is embarrassing to the Author to print anything 
so complimentary to himself personally. The reader is 

198 



Cuba, Alaska and Indian Schools 199 

begged to subordinate the personal feature to the General's 
statement regarding the broad and valuable results of the 
use of the method. 

War Department 
Office of the Chief of Staff 
Washington 

September 10, 1913. 
To Whom It May Concern: 

Mr. Wilson L. Gill was on duty in Cuba during the period 
that I was Military Governor of the Island, and performed 
most valuable service in the establishment of the "School 
Republic." The results were most satisfactory; indeed, 
they were so satisfactory that I unhesitatingly commend the 
idea as worthy of most serious consideration. Mr. Gill, 
in the discharge of his duties, dsiplayed very marked ability 
and the results were far reaching and valuable, and are fully 
set forth in my various reports as Military Governor of Cuba 
and the reports of the officials at the head of the Public 
School System of the Island. This system would, I believe, 
be especially valuable in all schools, and would result in our 
children being much better equipped for the discharge of 
their civic responsibilities. 

LEONARD WOOD, 
Major-General, Chief of Staff. 

As One Man — Editorial in La Realidad, Havana 

However much the paths of Havana editors may diverge 
when they pursue partisan questions, it is interesting to note 
they have been almost as one man in the support they have 
given the School Republic method of training people while 
in the schools to appreciate and exercise the rights and per- 
form the obligations of citizenship. 

We reproduce the last article on the School Republic, as 
published by our contemporary La Patria, with which we 
are in hearty and earnest accord. 

[This is a very forceful editorial of three columns, by Dr. 
Lincoln De Sayas, Editor of "La Patria," but the limits of 
this book will admit of only the following brief extract. He 



200 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

had been Assistant Superintendent of Public Schools, and 
later was Secretary of Education in the President's cabinet.] 

The Hope of Cuba 

The introduction of Mr. Gill's system into our public 
schools opens up a vast horizon to our young people. It is 
wholesome, moral, patriotic education. If our future citizens 
do not know how to exercise their rights and fulfil their duties 
as tax-payers and electors, then indeed all treasure which has 
been spent, the generous blood which has been shed, and the 
heroic lives which have been sacrificed on the altar of Cuba's 
liberty, shall have been in vain. 

If, on the other hand, our schools shall develop our young 
men and women into industrious, moral, Patriotic members 
of a free country, fulfilling all the duties and obligations of 
their sphere in life with conscience and fidelity, the Republic 
of Cuba will be worthy of all the sacrifices which have been 
made on its behalf, and assured of a long, prosperous and 
glorious existence. 

The hope of Cuba is in her young boys and girls. No work, 
no labor, no sacrifice can be too wearisome or dear, if the 
object is to bring up honest, conscientious citizens of the 
future republic in right principles of civic duties. Mr. Gill's 
system of moral and civic instruction will convert every 
schoolroom into a miniature republic and every scholar into 
a peaceful, law-abiding, righteous citizen. 



An official letter to the teachers in Alasks, from the United 
States Commissioner of Education, Dr. P. P. Claxton, is 
also given, both because of his personal reputation as a 
great educator, and because he is the highest official educa- 
tional authority in the United States. It is well to note 
that he takes the responsibility of determining that this 
method shall be used in all the schools under the authority 
of the United States Bureau of Education, and does not 
leave it as an uncertainty with the teachers. This is the 
fair and just thing to be done so far as the teachers and 
pupils are concerned. 



Cuba, Alaska and Indian Schools 201 

Department of the Interior 

Bureau of Education 

Washington 

Alaska Division December 9, 1912 

THE SCHOOL CITY. 

To the Teachers in the Alaska School Service : — 

The object of the Alaska School Service is the advancement 
in civilization of the native races, with a view to their ultimate 
absorption into the body politic as good citizens. The full 
attainment of this object is doubtless remote, but we welcome 
every effective agency toward the accomplishment of this end. 

The School City, a school democracy founded on kindness and 
justice, has proved itself a vital influence in preparing for in- 
telligent citizenship the white children in the public schools in 
the United States, the children in the Indian Schools, and in the 
schools of Cuba. 

The introduction of the School City into our schools in Alaska 
will be an important influence in securing the sympathetic 
co-operation of the pupils; by inculcating the duties, privileges, 
and responsibilities of citizenship, it will more rapidly prepare 
the natives of Alaska for citizenship. 

I transmit herewith two pamphlets by Mr. Wilson L. Gill, 
LL.B., the father of the School City Movement: 
The School Republic in Indian Schools. 
Bad Civic Conditions and a Remedy. 

You are directed to read these pamphlets carefully, 
thoroughly to master the principles therein set forth, to 
familiarize yourselves with the methods of procedure 
recommended and, using your best judgment, put them 
into effect in your school and in the native village in which 
your school is situated. 

Information regarding your action in this matter should be 
included in your annual report. 

Assuring you of my personal interest in your work, I am, 
Very Respectfully, 

P. P. CLAXTON, Commissioner. 

These letters from Mr. Charles F. Hauke, Second Assistant 
Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the Carson Indian 



202 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

School, will give an idea of how the method is received in 
some parts of the Indian service. 

Department of the Interior 

Office of Indian Affairs 

Washington 

June 24, 1911. 
Mr. Wilson L. Gill, 

Supervisor of Indian Schools, 
Sir: 

I am in receipt of a letter from Mrs. Bertha Barnes, 
Secretary of The Stewart Golden Rule Association at Carson 
Indian School, under date of June 12, 1911, enclosing copies 
of letters addressed to you in response to a resolution of 
the Association, expressing appreciation of the service rendered 
by you, during your recent visit, in introducing the School 
Republic Method of Civic Training at that school. 

It is a pleasure to note that your visit proved to be highly 
satisfactory and that you were able to accomplish so much. 

Respectfully, 

C. F. HAUKE, 
6-LC-21 Second Assistant Commissioner. 



Department of the Interior 

United States Indian Service 

Stewart, Nevada 

June 12, 1911. 
Mr. Wilson L. Gill, 

Supervisor at Large. 
Dear Sir: 

At a meeting last evening of the Stewart Golden Rule 
Association which has just been organized by all the teachers 
and employees of the Carson Indian School and officers of 
our School State, to enable us to co-operate most efficiently 
to make a thorough success of Commissioner Valentine's 
plan to introduce your Youth's Commonwealth, or School 
Republic Method of Civic Training into our school, a resolu- 
tion was introduced by Mr. Belmonte and unanimously adopt- 
ed, directing me, their Secretary, to draft a letter to be signed 



Cuba, Alaska and Indian Schools 203 

by each member of our club, expressing our gratitude to you 
and to Mr. Valentine, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who 
has sent you to us for the invaluable service you have ren- 
dered, not only to the Indian children, but to ourselves. 

Enclosed herewith, please find the said letter, and having 
had a large experience in the Indian Service, believe me to 
be deeply impressed with the far-reaching importance and 
value of this effectual move for systematic co-operation for 
best conditions throughout the Service. 

Very respectfully and sincerely yours, 
BERTHA BARNES, 
Sec'y of The Stewart Golden Rule Association. 



Department of the Interior 

United States Indian Service 

Stewart, Nevada 

June 12, 1911. 
Mr. Wilson L. Gill, 

Supervisor at Large of Indian Schools. 
Dear Sir: 

We, the teachers and employees of the Carson Indian 
School and the School State officers, feeling grateful to you 
and to the officers of the Department of the Interior, who 
sent you to us, for the service you have rendered by the in- 
troduction of your School Republic method of civic training 
and co-operation for every good purpose among the Indian 
children in our charge, are addressing to you this letter to 
express, to you, our appreciation of its value, not only to the 
young people in our care, but to ourselves. 

We now realize that there is a large latent force for good 
in the children, which we have never known how to utilize, 
but which we now see can be developed, systematically, for 
their present and future comfort and usefulness, and also, 
that the co-operation of all the men and women entrusted 
with the care of the children, necessary to make a success of 
this system, will result in a good fellowship which cannot 
otherwise result than in greater efficiency for the purpose for 
which the school exists. 

We wish to assure you that we shall do all in our power to 



204 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

develop this system, knowing full well that it will require 
patience and persistence on our part to adapt it to the con- 
ditions which now exist and which we feel full confidence we 
shall be able to materially improve, by means of it. 

Grateful to Commissioner Valentine for giving to us this 
system, we are sending to him a copy of this letter. 
Very sincerely your friends, 
George Houten, Governor Emma Martin, 

Vincenti Burke, Lt. Governor, Mrs. Boileau, 
Minnie Charles, Chief Justice, C. H. Asbury, 
John Frank, Superintendent, 

Clerk of Legislature, Dale H. Reed, 

John T. Woodside, Daisy Washington, 

Mrs. Paul A. Walter, Angelo Belmonte, 

Nettie Reid, Paul A. Walter, 

Olive B. Burgess, W. S. Kreigh, 

Lottie George, Jennie O'Connor, 

J. Jerry Davis, Gertrude A. Cowles, 

Florence A. Queen, Mrs. Lulu White, 

Charles Hajohn, Bessie C. Elkins, 

Francis Mansfield, Julia A. Fisher, 

Allie H. Barnett, Bertha Barnes, 

Jessie L. Fisher. Secretary. 



There is much such testimony as the above. 

Miss Helen C. Sheahan, Mrs. Wadsworth, Miss Gould 
and other kindergarten and first and second grade teachers 
as well as many in the higher grades have used the method 
with success, some of them as many as ten years ago. Dr. 
Charles M. Buchanan, Superintendent at Tulalip, has used 
the method many years. But all need the help of a spe- 
cial supervisor. 

The ordinary methods in the Indian schools tend to in- 
stitutionalize, demoralize and break down personal inde- 
pendence and the desire to be self-supporting. Commissioner 
Valentine formally adopted the School Republic method 
to aid in correcting this unfortunate condition, and the 
Government ought to insist on its successful use in every 
Indian school. 



CHAPTER III 

IN PRIMARY AND GRAMMAR SCHOOLS 

Letters to the Franklin Institute from Several Supervising 
Principals of Philadelphia Schools 

THE names of the writers are withheld, partly because 
some of them have objected to the burdensome 
amount of correspondence resulting from previous 
publication. 



In the fall of 1898, the Board of Public Education authorized 
me by resolution to put Mr. Gill's method into operation in 
my school. Acting upon the authority thus given me, I 
promptly organized a school Republic in my School, in No- 
vember of that year, and so have had five years' experience 
with it. The School Board printed the School City charter, 
which had been revised by Mr. Simon Gratz, to make it 
more nearly conform to our local municipal government. 

Good results followed immediately and have continued 
throughout these five years. Much of the rough conduct 
outside of the school rooms has been removed, and thereby 
the task of both the teacher and pupils has been materially 
lightened. 

The method is thoroughly successful and satisfactory. 
Where children have improved they have continued to im- 
prove. 

I have always felt that the greatest good accomplished 
by the School Republic was through the moral atmosphere 
which it creates. 

It brings the principal and teacher into closer touch with 
the children, and gives an opportunity for direct moral 
training upon many questions which never arise in the 
ordinary routine of school discipline. 

205 



206 A New Citizenship— Appendix 

Incidentally the children learn a great deal of their city 
government, of the manner of conducting elections, and of 
the duties of the several offices of mayor, councilman, etc., 
but I have always considered this secondary to the great 
moral lessons of learning to respect law for law's sake, of 
doing right because it is right, and of being kinder and more 
polite to one another in their daily intercourse. 



While I believe the School Republic to be a good thing, I 
also believe that it needs to be wisely directed by those who 
are in full sympathy with its spirit, and who understand 
that to send the child out into the world fully equipped for 
citizenship, he must be trained, not only mentally and physi- 
cally but morally, with correct character and habits of citizen- 
ship already formed, and this may to a large extent be ac- 
complished by the School Republic method. 






I have been most agreeably surprised by the success of the 
School Republic. I did not approve this plan of school 
government when it was first presented to me, and should 
not have adopted it had it not been for the positive request 
of Mr. Simon Gratz. I thought I knew (theoretically) it 
could not succeed, it being so opposed to all our present 
modes of school government that it is simply revolutionary, 
hence, to be accepted, it must make good its claims by success. 

Despite my a priori assumptions, it has been a success 
thus far and it is but proper to state that I have reversed 
my opinion in regard to the adaptability of the School 
Republic. At first I did not believe it could succeed perma- 
nently in any school. After we had it in operation a short time, 
I believed it might succeed in some schools. Now I am con- 
vinced that it may succeed in every school. Nothing, not 
even a School Republic, can be a success if it is not rightly 
managed. A School Republic will require care and tact. 
I can readily see that it will soon cease to exist in any given 
school, if it is not properly organized and vigilantly super- 
vised—yet not too openly, for the children must think and 



In Primary and Grammar Schools 207 

exercise their ingenuity and realize that they are doing it. 
Then, too, the enthusiasm must be maintined by the princi- 
pal and teachers. 

I felt that the judiciary could not be made to work — "a 
child could not be judicial," I said, but three of our pupils 
have proved to be excellent judges, and the judiciary is, 
perhaps, the strongest part of our city government. 

The effect on those elected or appointed to offices has been 
excellent. 

At first thought, it seemed to me that the School Republic 
was based on the old monitorial system, but it is not. In the 
latter the authority comes from the principal, hence the 
monitor represents the principal and the teachers. In the 
former the officers represent the children themselves. This 
is a difference in kind, not merely in degree. The School 
Republic is based on the principle of the self- activity of 
the child. Through it the children are working out for them- 
selves the idea of government and of right living. 

The good results already obtained fully pay for all the 
trouble they have cost, and I expect still better results when 
I shall have had more experience in the use of the method. 
We have really only begun to use its possible opportunities 
and resources for moral and civic training and development. 
At each step, new possibilities open up before us. In fact, 
the most discouraging thought is that "it is too good to be 
true," but it certainly is true up to the present stage of our 
experience, and I see no good reason for doubting that the 
future will give at least as good results as the past. 

During the coming year I shall watch and guide our School 
Republic with great interest, yet with equal solicitude. 



My observation of the School Republic has satisfied me 
of its efficiency. As far as I am able to judge it does all that 
is claimed for it. In some essential particulars the evidence 
of its value in my school is practically complete, and, from 
the nature of the case, can only be confirmed by future ex- 
perience. The interest among the pupils is keen, and those 
elected to the different offices are the ones best fitted for them. 






208 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

This, I think, is one of the most important lessons in good 
government which can be taught. The court has been very 
well conducted and few suggestions from me have been 
necessary. The culprits brought before the Judge are always 
deeply and seriously impressed, and the decisions of the 
Judge are accepted as just and right. The effect on the general 
tone and demeanor of the school has been highly satisfactory 
to me. One of the best indications is the lessening number 
of cases brought into court. Offenses are on the decrease 
because the pupils are becoming more self-controled and 
better behaved. The School Republic has developed a 
better esprit de corps and greater loyalty to the school. 
The children take a great pride in their organization and a 
live interest in its success. The spirit shown by the police- 
men has been admirable. At first, I feared that petty jeal- 
ousies and spites might interfere with the success of the 
system. But these cases have been very few. A spirit of 
kindness and helpfulness is abroad and the youthful citizens 
realize that the policemen have the honor and good name of 
their School Republic in keeping. All the officials feel the 
responsibilities placed upon them, and their duties are con- 
scientiously performed. The pupils are coming to a reali- 
zation of the moral rights of others, of their duties towards 
each other and their school, and of the principles of good 
government. 

In conclusion I may remark that no one who considers 
this subject critically and philosophically can fail to perceive 
that the maintenance of a vital and enthusiastic interest 
in the School Republic depends not upon the pupils, but 
upon the instructor who has the method in use. 






After a more extended experience with our School Re- 
public, I am glad to say that I am able to heartily endorse 
all the praise of the system to which I gave expression when 
the organization was but one week old. Moreover, I feel 
now assured of the permanency of the influence. The re- 
sults, in the early days, seemed almost too good to be true, 
and I confess to my fears that some day I should wake up to 



In Primary and Grammar Schools 209 

find all of the beauty flown. In school a novelty wears out 
in a week or two, and then we have to search for another. 
The interest and enthusiasm in the School Republic is stronger 
now than it ever was, for it has grown week by week. It 
seems that the interest has become more solid and serious 
now that the organization is no longer a novelty. The 
children are more deeply in earnest, and so have proved that 
there is nothing of the novelty feature in the remarkable 
influences which have grown out of the system. 

The fact that the School Republic has at once produced 
the practical results for which we have labored unsuccess- 
fully for many years, forces into our minds a comparison 
between this system and that so long in vogue. 

It has been practically demonstrated that the School 
Republic does actually produce better order. This is not a 
minor detail, as will be recognized by the careful thinker. 
What does this improved discipline signify? It means that 
the child is building character, that he is subjecting his will 
to his conscience. Obedience to law is largely a question 
of habit, the habit of self-control. If, through self-govern- 
ment, the child becomes accustomed to governing himself, he 
will learn the most valuable lesson of life. In the School 
Republic every tendency is toward encouraging the child 
to choose to do right, while the autocratic government 
attempts to compel him, with doubtful success and much 
failure, to do right. Here we are confronted with the simple 
problem of the value of self- activity, which lifted Froebel 
above the heads of all the preceeding educators. The School 
Republic embodies a development of the law of self-activity 
from the Kindergarten continously through the school life, 
until the youth emerges from the University into the larger 
citizenship. 

Having had five years' experience in the Kindergarten 
before asssuming the supervision of this school, I found it 
difficult, and often impossible, to coalesce the Froebelian 
method with that of the old traditional school discipline. 

The School Republic is a development, on a higher and 
more mature plane, of the principles upon which the Kinder- 
garten discipline is founded, and will effectually close much 






210 A New Citizenship — Appendix 



of the gap which has existed between the Kindergarten and 
the Primary School. 

The one great requisite to success with a School Republic 
is enthusiastic and intelligent supervision. The children 
will supply whatever else is necessary. This being true, 
how important it becomes for the principal to have the advice 
and assistance of some one more experienced than herself in 
matters of civic school government. Difficult problems 
continually arise that can be easily solved by an expert, 
while the less experienced principal, no matter how earnest, 
may make a partial failure on account of lacking the know- 
ledge that can come alone with long experience in School 
Republic organization. Surely it is as important to have 
civics and ethics under departmental superintendence as 
it is to have music, drawing, arithmetic, language, etc., 
specially supervised. 






New York City. 

The lesson to the child of self-government in a practical 
form, as taught by the School Republic in the daily perfor- 
mance of its duties, the constant and continued recognition 
of its motto, and the natural willingness and love in the child 
to imitate its elders, all unite to make for character and manli- 
ness. 

The primary child has little grasp of mind, and yet I am 
very willing to attest to the fact that in Public School 31, 
in the short time devoted to the School Republic, the many 
very necessary details that go to make successful and in- 
telligent management were greatly facilitated and improved 
by the aid of the underlying principles of popular self-govern- 
ment and the necessity of practicing these principles. 

Milicent Baum, Principal. 



CHAPTER IV 

SCHOOL REPUBLIC IN A HIGH SCHOOL 

FOLLOWING are a few out of a large number of state- 
ments by high school pupils, just as direct, clear and 
positive as these from Summerville, which is geographi- 
cally but not politically a part of Boston. 

Student Government is a Success in Our High School 

The student government, which has been inaugurated in 
many schools of this country, is doing a great work for the 
pupils. There are many reasons why this is true. We have 
demonstrated the following facts in our English Class, 
Division B, third year in the High School. 

First, The system gives the scholars self reliance. Each 
member of a council has a right to express his views on any 
subject brought before the assembly, and so he gains confi- 
dence in his own opinions. 

Second, The plan affords parliamentary training. The 
meetings are run by parliamentary laws. Thus the student 
gains a knowledge of assembly usages which will be helpful 
in the future. 

Third, It aroused an increased interest in the school work. 
In order to receive the school renumeration, the pupil must 
rise each day and give some information to the council or 
assembly. In this way, the interest is kept up in the work. 

Fourth, Better deportment in the class results. Students 
dislike to have a reprimand given them by the presiding 
officer or the sergeant-at-arms. 

Fifth, The effect on the whole school is good. One division 
in our school has aroused considerable interest in the whole 
school because of its improved work under student govern- 
ment. The division has proved its ability to govern itself 
under difficult conditions. 

In view of these facts, we claim that the system of govern- 

211 



212 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

ment by the students is a benefit to the pupils and to their 
school, and that it should be continued. Chas. H. Upton. 

Democracy in the School Room 

The democratic form of government applied to our English 
division has interested me very much, to see what it would 
accomplish. In the beginning, we elected our officers ac- 
cording to parliamentary rules, and then we proceeded to 
do our work. As I did not know very much about parlia- 
mentary law, I was obliged to sit quiet and listen. In a 
few days I had some knowledge of the rules and then I had 
an interest to take part in the discussions. In order to do 
this I was obliged to know my lessons, and this set me to 
work. 

This way of doing our work allows anyone to stand up 
and give his or her views on the question. My spirit has been 
changed and the lessons seem to be learned in a very different 
way. 

On the whole, I think that we are aiming at a good mark 
and shall accomplish our purpose. Max Yarner. 

The School City Method of Conducting Recitations 

This new method of conducting recitation is, in most ways, 
far superior to the old method of letting the whole resonsibility 
for the class fall on the teacher alone. Responsibility is 
in itself educational. This fact is ignored by the schools 
but, thanks to Mr. Gill and our teacher, Miss Hunt, we are 
getting the benefit of it. 

It gives the power to the class, to promote its own efficiency; 
and, since "two heads are better than one," the judgment 
in marking, and in giving out the new lessons, is more en- 
couraging to the pupils. 

It prepares the pupils for good citizenship, when in later 
years, they are to take part in the affairs of the city. A boy 
is now considered a man long before he is of a man's size 
and before he possesses a manly mind. Therefore he should 
be prepared for more manly duty. 



In a High School 213 

In the class, it gives every member a chance to do some- 
thing, and he is kept busy most of the time. 

This system is especially important because it lays the 
foundation for a more manly life. Norman Morrison. 

Student Government 

Our democratic city government helps to train each member 
of our class in the duties of a citizen of our immediate com- 
munity and of the United States, and thus tends to make 
good citizens of us. 

It enables each one to have self-reliance, and shows us 
how to govern ourselves. We learn how to distinguish be- 
tween right and wrong in the questions which arise from day 
to day in our social and class-room relations and by means 
of this we obtain an opinion of our own. 

As our school work is only a preparation for future work 
as citizens of our country, we should be trained in the duties 
of a good citizen, we should know how to conduct ourselves 
as citizens in every respect, and we should be acquainted 
with parliamentary laws. All this we are acquiring by our 
system of democratic government. C. M. Brine. 

The Value of Student Government 

Conducting our class under the form of city government 
resluts in various gains. One is that it causes debate, the 
effect of which is bringing out many obscure points from the 
work in hand. We are covering the college preparatory 
work within the given limit of time. 

It causes the class to be orderly and invites self-discipline. 
The few disorderly pupils, such as are found in almost every 
class-room, are taken care of by the better spirit of the 
majority. 

One great gain is that in scholarship. Heretofore a pupil 
uninterested in the work would not study. Now, seing the 
spirit of the new work, he immediately becomes interested 
and does his share in making it a success. 

But this system does not apply to school life alone. While 
conducting ourselves thus, we are unconsciously acquiring 



214 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

parliamentary rules and modes of procedure. It developes 
the power of speaking before any organized assembly. In 
a word, student government is preparing us for our future 
life, because no matter what our vocation may be, we shall 
find it valuable. Moreover, it is especially valuable to those 
who will take active part in our government, whether it be 
national, state, or municipal. Arthur A. Riley. 

Three Reasons for Democratic School Government 

Democratic government in secondary schools is coming 
to be very popular for several reasons : first, it puts the 
student upon his or her honor; second, it generally forces 
attention and stimulates interest among the scholars; and 
lastly, it develops self-reliance. 

We shall consider these statements in order. First, it 
puts the student upon his or her honor. Among many of the 
school's officers the truth of this statement would seem very 
doubtful, if not absolutely false, yet it is true. To prove 
our point, we will give several instances, namely, the behavior 
of a division when the instructor was absent, was such as to 
bring commendation from the Head Master, whereas, under 
the old system, the same class would have caused great in- 
convenience to others. Again, there is better order in the 
corridors from the divisions under democratic government 
than heretofore. 

Second, it forces attention and stimulates interest among 
the students. The work to be covered during two months 
time, has been done as well, if not better than formerly. 
Furthermore, upon the statement of the instructor, the new 
plan has brought several to the front rank who previously 
never did any work. 

Third, it develops self-reliance. We make this last 
assertion more especially from the officers' standpoint than 
from the councilmen's; because the expression of the people's 
will is through their representatives. Those who study such 
schemes as these have noticed that the officers are the most 
cool headed, reliable and honest students in the whole school. 
There may be exceptions to this, but generally it is true. 



In a High School 215 

Therefore we have shown you that democratic government 
is desirable for three reasons: 

First, it puts the student upon his or her honor. 

Second, it generally forces attention and stimulates in- 
terest, and, Lastly, it develops self-reliance. O'Brien. 

The Value of Democratic School Government 

The proof of the value of Democratic School Government 
as applied in our division of the third class in the Hight 
School depends first on whether the quantity of the work 
has been kept up to standard; second, on whether the quality 
of the work done in the class room has been improved, and 
third, whether each individual can honestly say that he has 
been benefited in some way or other by the new system. 

First, we have done all that is required in the curriculum 
and in addition have read in connection with this, much 
that is not required. 

Second, the quality of our work has decidedly improved. 

Third, every individual has derived important benefit 
because of the introduction of the new system. 

The value of student government is not confined to the 
classroom. The businesslike attitude acquired in the class- 
room by the student is carried into all his other work. 

For one to have a considerable knowledge of parliamentary 
practice is of more practical benefit than might at first 
appear. It makes one acquianted with the method of pro- 
cedure in organized meetings with which one is bound to 
come in contact later in life. 

To one who is not accustomed to speaking in public it is 
often very embarrassing to address a meeting, but by the 
practice acquired in the classroom this embarrassment is 
overcome. The art of expressing oneself clearly, distinctly, 
logically, and to the point is gradually acquired by the con- 
tinual practice afforded by student government. 

It teaches a young person to have a mind of his own and 
to use it for the welfare of his country now and when he comes 
to that age when he may do so on a larger scale. 

Howard Stout. 






CHAPTER V 
SCHOOL REPUBLIC IN A NORMAL SCHOOL 

A CLASS of the State Normal School at New Paltz, 
New York, having graduated and returned to their 
homes, in response to the request of their president 
they wrote their opinions on postal cards as follows. There 
was not one adverse opinion. President Kaine has added 
his opinion at greater length and Miss Cocks sent a fuller 
expressed opinion, which is appended : 

Susan Barlow: The School Republic has strengthened 
the character of each individual member of the school and 
made practical the idea of government. 

Mary C. Doremus : The good done by the School Republic 
cannot be limited to a single paragraph nor to a hundred. 
The student who leaves our New Paltz Normal School 
without clearly defined ideas as to civic duties and civic 
privileges must be dull indeed; and to understand these is to 
take a conscious pride in that freedom which is the birthright 
of every American. 

H. D. Torpey; It was a help to me. The children were 
more easily disciplined. It was both the cause and the means 
of moulding the characters of some children. In every way 
I found it a success. 

J. DuB. Hasbrouck: I think it is a good thing. 

Cornelia Macy: A school is best governed when every 
member aids in enforcing the laws wisely made for its govern- 
ment. The School Republic furnishes opportunities for this. 
Furthermore, it trains for future citizenship, fosters self- 
control and consideration for the rights of others, and creates 
true patriotism. 

J. H. Ganun : Established and maintained with the proper 
spirit by teachers and students alike, it proves a very satis- 
factory method of government and a great help in familiariz- 

216 



In a Normal School 217 

ing us with civic customs. But as soon as the teachers fail 
to support it, it then, in my opinion, will become a mere farce. 
It is a method for use of teachers. If an artist does not use 
his method, but leaves his brushes in the hands of children, 
of course they will do no good, but will make a mess. There 
is not the slightest difficulty in maintaining the students' 
interest if the teachers keep up their own. 

Margaret B. Lucy: The School Republic government is 
of great benefit to the young pupils and older stduents. It 
leads them to obtain self-control. It meets the needs of the 
students more than any other system, because it is by the 
students for the students. 

Rebecca C. Cocks: The School Republic is of educationl 
value. It is advantageous to students and teachers and 
practicable in a normal school. 

Mary F. Lindholm: The School Republic has done much 
toward training for citizenship, self-control, and co-operation 
with others in the noble and important enterprises of life. 
Adalena Denniston: The School Republic has given our 
students not only an opportunity of acquainting themselves 
with the practical work in the forms of government, but it 
has helped in securing the development of self-govern- 
mental power in the students themselves. 

Sara K. Story : The School Republic ought to be in every 
wide-awake school. By means of it, the children are able to 
come into close relations with the workings of our government, 
thus making them more interested in the political affairs 
of their own town. 

It forms a basis from which the child acquires his idea of 
what a true citizen ought to be. It has made children more 
tidy, also more thoughtful of others. 

H. Belle Little : The School Republic has made the pupils 
in the grades more interested in their national government 
and laws than they would otherwise have been. As for my- 
self, the School Republic has gvien me an insight in national 
affairs in a way which, no doubt, I would never have gained. 
Katherine V. Mullen: The School Republic has many 
advantages. Under it one feels there is a strong government 
over him, yet he does not feel that cast iron rule of the old 






218 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

knowledge of the form of government under which they live, 
and become better citizens. 

Mabel S. Davis: I consider the School Republic the hap- 
piest, most profitable school organization I have ever seen 
in operation. I believe its success is due to the fact that every 
student is reached and participates in it. 

Eva Keator : The School Republic has relieved the faculty 
from many cares, and the students have made practical the 
workings of our American government, an experience that 
no student can afford to do without. 

Mazie F. Ward : The effects have been good, and we have 
gained what is of great importance, a knowledge of parlia- 
mentary law and of the workings of a democratic government, 
which we could not have grasped under any other circum- 
stances. 

Edna B. Tellerday: The School Republic has made the 
students more free than they were under the previous regu- 
lations, and to feel the responsibility that they must make a 
success of the School Republic, thus leading them on to en- 
deavor to make a success of life. 

Charles D. Coutant: The School Republic has done a 
great deal of good and has had its designed effect on the 
people of the New Paltz Normal. 

Daisy B. Hitch : Carried on in a sincere and conscientious 
manner by all, the School Republic is a form of government 
greatly to be desired in our schools. It nourishes patriotism 
by means of giving a clearer insight into the workings of 
our country and its laws. It makes one independent and 
self-reliant by forcing one to meet, to estimate, and to decide 
problems for oneself. It broadens and beautifies the character 
by means of its just decisions, since a person is loath to do 
wrong when his honor is put to a test. If it should be car- 
ried on in a slipshod fashion, with ''winking eyes," it would 
be a curse to the community, a hindrance to its civilization 
and a wrong to the individual. 

Isaac Conklin: A School Republic is of several distinct 
values. Its chief value is to the students and it is by no means 
of minor value to a faculty. Standing in the student's 
position, I have enjoyed the benefits that it is their privilege 



In a Normal School 219 

to receive. I have had valuable instruction in civics, including 
organizations, elections, duties and powers of officers and 
court proceedings. 

As a whole, it has done a great deal of good at New Paltz. 
It has imbued every one with the idea of his personal re- 
sponsibility and duty toward every one in general, in order 
that he and every one else may enjoy the greatest privileges 
with the least possible friction. I am sure it has helped to 
solve one of the great problems of sociology of the present 
day and has accomplished much in this line and will do more, 
as improvements will come with time. 

Alpha Rauch: I am in favor of the School Republic 
government. I believe it fosters a democratic spirit and 
cultivates the power of self-government which is very es- 
sential to one who is to help rule in a democracy. It culti- 
vates the proper spirit and gives opportunity for the student 
to learn through real practice how a republic is carried on. 
It has been successful in securing order in the New Paltz 
Normal. 

E. C. Clemens: The School Republic advantages far ex- 
ceed its disadvantages. Although one feels that there is a 
strong government over him, he does not feel that excessive 
restriction of the old form of school government. It teaches 
children, as well as older people, much concerning the form 
of government under which they must live. It gives a nobler 
idea of citizenship. I heartily approve of the School Republic. 

Ida Kaiser: The School Republic, if well led by faithful 
teachers, is an ideal form of school government. While it 
is maintaining order in the schoolroom through the pupils 
themselves, it is also preparing the young people to be good in- 
telligent citizens. The School Republic is algreatlessonin civics. 

Frances Lewis: The School Republic is a success, but last 
year less attention was paid to enforcing the laws than in 
previous years, and that was a disadvantage. 

Mabelle Clark: The School Republic arouses in the child 
the brotherly feeling, "Do to others as you would that they 
should do to you," and stimulates in older students the de- 
sire to act as citizens should act by giving them practical 
experience in performing civic duties. 



220 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

Charles M. Deyo: The School Republic tends to arouse 
interest in city government, gives practical experience in 
submission to muuicipal authority and in the responsibilities 
of civic office, all of which lead to model citizenship. 

Josehp M. Kaine : The concensus of opinion of my class- 
mates is that the School Republic is a most valuabel shaping 
tool, as Mr. Gill would say, for the use of the principal and 
teachers, and the enthusiasm and general good results are 
dependent upon thier skill and faithfulness, of which these 
are an inevitable gauge. They must sustain their interest and 
give constant evidence that they are in deep earnest. These 
necessary conditions being given, good results in every di- 
rection follow with as much certainty as in all nature plants 
and fruits follow according to the seeds that are sown and 
the cultivation expended on them. For the School Republic 
the seeds of truth, self-respect, conscientiousness, diligence, 
independence, kindness and the spirit of democracy should 
be planted; the garden should be wartered, weeded and tilled, 
and the flowers will be fragrant and beautiful and the fruits 
wholesome. The hearts of little children are virgin soil, 
while those of older students have been worked over and are 
apt to be impregnated with the seeds of weeds. 

We believe the School Republic is good for little children 
and older students, for keeping order, shaping character, 
lubricating the machinery of school life and giving knowledge 
and practice of the rights and duties of American citizenship. 
In my own experience, nothing else has so much helped me 
to think on my feet and give expression to my thoughts, or 
given me the impulse to do that which I see ought to be done 
for our common good. 

Is of Educational Value 

Rebecca C. Cocks: In the mass meetings which are a 
necessity of government, the students get drill in parliament- 
tary practice, which will be ofuse to them in anysphereof life. 
1 The term "civil procedure" is often heard, but its full 
meaning is learned only by actual service, and for this the 
School Republic provides. Thus methods of civil procedure 
are forcibly taught alike to boys and girls. The civil service 



In a Normal School 221 

in school creates a lively interest in political government, 
which could not otherwise be obtained. The mayor, sheriff, 
policemen, etc., of the School Republic are aroused to study 
the duty of their various offices and to learn who are filling 
those offices in the larger world. The knowledge thus gained 
of laws and the methods of enforcing them will be conducive 
to habits of obedience not only in school but also in the 
braoder life of the citizen which follows. 

The discussions which arise in the mass meetings and the 
courts afford excellent training in logical thought and clear, 
concise expression. True, this exercise may be had elsewhere, 
but it may lack the interest which it never fails to have in 
connection with the School Republic. 

The teacher in the ordinary public school has the respon- 
sibility of governing others, and for this should be prepared 
by self-government in the Normal School. If pupils in a 
Normal School are not able to govern themselves, they surely 
are not to be trusted with the government of others. A 
student is strengthened by independence and enabled to 
think and act without supervision. 

Lastly, the School Republic teaches regard for the rights 
of others, which is an essential of good citizenship in any 
community. 

Useful Alike to Teachers and Pupils 

A student tried in court of the School Republic is con- 
victed on the testimony of fellow citizens, who are striving 
to protect their government and to advance the initerests of 
the School Republic. The student arraigned may demand 
trial by jury and may be given every chance to prove his 
innocence. More important than these the students who best 
know their own needs in government may supply their 
needs through the School Republic, and the exercise of this 
right will secure unity of interest. 

If the laws are made by the students, every citizen is 
responsible for their execution, and the absence of the teachers 
will not be a signal for disorder. The teachers thus relieved 
of all police duty, may give undivided attention to instruc- 
tion and inspiration; and the friendly feelings between 



222 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

faculty and students which are a result of self-government 
will do much to enable all to do their best work. 

The School Republic is Practicable and Successful 
The School Republic is practicable. It has been used in 
our school for several years and proved to be successful in 
many respects and directions, of which the following is but 
a partial summary: In improving the spirit of school life; 
in saving time for both teachers and pupils; as a form of 
government to preserve order, and thus relieving the teachers 
to a large extent of that element of labor, the maintaining of 
discipline, which is the greatest source of worry and hindrance 
to the accomplishment of the chief objects of a school; in 
arousing and maintaining an interest in the study of citizen- 
ship and civil government; as a means of shaping the character 
of the pupils; as a pretty accurate thermometer to show the 
degree of warmth of the teacher's interest in the pupils and 
enthusiasm for the educational welfare of the school. 



New Paltz, N. Y. 
During the last three years we have seen some of the most 
important phases of school reform worked out at our Nor- 
mal School. Especially is it noteworthy that the usual ma- 
chinery of school organization has for the most part been left to 
stand idle, and the student body left largely free from arbitrary 
restraint, to develop, as individuals and collectively, such 
resources as have lain within it. Once some of us would have 
looked for serious results of such freedom, but they have not 
followed. The school is successfully governed, for the most 
part by itself — better governed than it could be by any force 
from without, because governed with less of antagonism and 
more of ready co-operation; with less of mechanical routine 
and more of spontaneity and life; better governed not only 
in the sense of being restrained — for restraint is not the only 
element in good government — but better governed, too, in 
the sense of being set actively at work for the good of the 
whole. Jeanette E. Graham, 

Instructor in Psychology. 



CHAPTER VI 
A GOLD MEDAL AWARDED 
Addresses at Franklin Institute School Republic Banquet 

THE Franklin Institute having awarded Mr. Gill its 
highest distinction in recognition of his work, a num- 
ber of members of the Institute took steps to gain 
for the School Republic movement the support of the ad- 
vanced classes of the community, and this took form in a 
banquet. Mr. James Mapes Dodge, Vice President of the 
Institute presided. On this occasion the Elliott Cresson gold 
medal and diploma were handed to Mr. Gill by the president 
of the Institute. Addresses were made by Mr. John Birkin- 
bine, President; the chairman of the Institutes committee 
on the Gill School Republic, Mr. Louis Edward Levy; Rev. 
Thomas R. Slicer of New York City who was one of the 
earliest observers and friends of the method; Rev. Charles 
Wood, now of the Church of the Covenant, Washington, 
D. C, Bishop Coadjutor Alexander Mackay-Smith of 
Philadelphia; and many others. Some of these are given in 
the following pages. Letters of approval and encouragement 
were received from Cardinal James Gibbons and others. 
The one from President Roosevelt was as follows : 

"I hear with satisfaction that an earnest movement is well 
advanced in Philadelphia to establish in the schools of that 
city the teaching of civics by the admirable plan originated 
by Wilson L. Gill in the School City as a form of student 
government. I know of the work of Mr. Gill, both in this 
country and in Cuba, where Mr. Gill inaugurated this form 
of instruction upon the invitation of General Wood. Nothing 
could offer higher promise for the future of our country than 
an intelligent interest in the best ideals of citizenship, its 
privileges and duties among the students of our common 
schools. I wish for your efforts in this direction the utmost 
success." 223 



224 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

The School Republic's Place 

In the Development of Educational Methods 

Louis Edward Levy 

High Character of Investigators 
In responding to a call for an expression regarding the 
School Republic system on the part of the Committee on 
Science and the Arts of the Franklin Institute, I feel impelled 
first of all, to say that the recommendation of the award of 
the Institute's highest recognition to Mr. Gill as the origi- 
nator of the system was unanimously agreed upon by all 
the members of the sub-committee which had been appointed 
to investigate this new educational movement. In this com- 
mittee were included three distinguished scientists, who have 
had experience through many years as educators, Prof. 
Lewis M.^Haupt, recently member of the Nicaragua Canal 
Commission and formerly a member of the faculty of the 
University of Pennsylvania; Prof. Samuel P. Sadtler, now a 
member of that faculty, and Dr. Harry F. Keller, of the 
Central High School. Besides these men, the committee in- 
cluded Martin I. Wilbert, chemist of the German Hospital, 
and Senor Raimundo Cabrera, a leading lawyer and publicist 
of Cuba and editor of "Cuba y America," of Havana, together 
with myself. 

The Institute's Highest Recognition 
Considerable time was spent in the investigation and the 
data obtained were discussed through two meetings of the 
general committee, with the result which has been embodied 
in our report and with the conclusion which has found ex- 
pression in the Elliott Cresson gold medal and diploma, the 
highest honor which is conferred by this Society, the presen- 
tation of which, delayed as it has been, has now found a 
most appropriate occasion. 

The Modern Educational Movement 
I shall detain you for the consideration of but one aspect 
of this many-sided subject. The school republic is the funda- 
mental principle of the kindergarten carried to its logical 
and full conclusion. And in order that we may better under- 



Gold Medal — Addresses 225 

stand this conclusion and its lesson, let us as briefly as possible 
consider its logic. 

The modern educational movement, of which the school 
republic is the latest and perhaps one of the most important 
of its many great fruitions, followed close upon the begin- 
ning of modern physical science a hundred and fifty years ago. 
In the generation which saw Franklin here in Philadelphia 
draw lightning from the clouds along his kite string and so 
make a beginning of modern electricial science, while Watt 
in Edinburgh was devising his steam engine and so opening 
the vista of modern mechanical science, and whilst Priestly 
in England and Lavoisier in France were making those re- 
searches and discoveries which became the foundation of 
modern chemistry, Rousseau, also in France, was disseminat- 
ing those new ideas on education which have furnished the 
basis of our modern science of pedagogics. 

Rousseau's Influence 

Like his co-laborers in the fields of the physical sciences, 
Rousseau turned from the misconceptions and false ideals of 
the old philosophies to find his inspiration in nature itself. 
He studied the nature of the growing child and learned enough 
to convince him of the utter fallacy of the prevailing methods 
of rearing and educating the rising generation. He did not 
compass a large horizon in his view, but he saw enough to 
understand the errors of his time and point the way to the 
truth. 

Rousseau reaped the usual reward of reformers of old 
abuses and of pioneers of progress. His epoch-making book, 
which was in the form of a fiction entitled "Emile," was con- 
demned by the scholastic authorities of Paris and ordered to 
be publicly burned, while he himself barely escaped imprison- 
ment by fleeing across the border to Switzerland. Even 
there he was persecuted by the educational authorities and 
eventually had to find an asylum in England. 

Pestalozzi's Training of the Sense of Observation 

But his ideas had taken root, not only in France, where 
their influence deepeden that resentment of the people 
against the government which grew during the next thirty 



226 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

years into the violence of the French revolution, but also 
through Europe, and especially in Switzerland. There his 
teachings were taken up, put in practice and improved 
upon by another great leader in educational progress. Pes- 
talozzi. He added to Rousseau's idea of a nautral system 
of education the further idea of training the tense of observa- 
tion so as to bring out the fullest capacity of the pupil. 
But he too, had to battle with untoward influences, with 
passive opposition and neglect, and he carried on his great 
pioneering work through a life-time of poverty and self- 
sacrifice. 

He was eventually enabled to establish a school in a small 
Swiss town, and there he worked for twenty years, scarcely 
able to maintain himself, while his ideas were slowly per- 
colating out into the world at large through a few choice 
spitirs who had come to learn from him. 

He died in 1827, understood and appreciated by only a 
comparatively few, widely scattered, liberal minds, but 
1846 the centenary of his birth, January 12, was ceebrated 
throughout Switzerland and Germany, Pestalozzi societies 
and institutes were being established everywhere, and when 
I was in Zurich a few years ago I was taken to see the Pesta- 
lozzi monument and quartered on Pestalozzi street. And no 
wonder that the Swiss point with pride to the life work of 
this great educator, for it was largely through his influence 
that Switzerland and especially Zurich, have become famous 
for their educational system and establishments. 

Froebel's Scheme of Spontaneous Activity 

Among those who became imbued with Pestalozzi's ideas 
who went to his school to learn his method, was another 
altruistic spirit, Frederich Froebel. In his mind the teachings 
of Rousseau and Pestalozzi developed into a wider scope. 
He conceived the idea that the true secret of the child's 
growth, moral and intellectual as well as physical, was spon- 
taneous activity, and that the natural processes and in- 
fluences of the home should be amplified and completed in 
the school. In the home the little children learn through play, 
and this the school was to continue by this method. In the 



Gold Medal — Addresses 227 

home the child gradually took its place in the family circle 
and came to realize that it had duties toward the rest as well 
as rights of its own, and this the school was to confirm by 
its training. 

He undertook to realize his idea in his native German 
village, where it was well received, but where he was most 
of the time left at the point of starvation. He removed to 
Switzerland, to where Pestzlozzi had worked thrity years 
before, but there met with such opposition as to be again 
starved out. 

He now went back to Germany and resolved to concentrate 
his efforts in behalf of the training of little children in prepara- 
tion for the larger schools. Little games and childish handi- 
crafts were carefully thought out by him to train the child 
in the direction of both concerted and independent action, 
the one to foster orderliness and discipline, and the other to 
build up character and independence. 

He worked along, developing his great scheme of the 
kindergarten in one which he carried on himself, found here 
and there an appreciative disciple, but no adequate support, 
and he finally had to give up for want of money. 

To gain a livelihood and to propagate his ideas he gave 
lectures on his system to teachers, and was barely getting 
along while his teachings were taking root when the political 
upheaval of 1848 came to pass. The revolution having failed 
the Prussian Government turned upon all new ideas as having 
anti- monarchic tendencies, and in 1851 the establishment of 
Froebel's schools was officially interdicted. Froebel was left 
to the charity of friends, and a year later, broken-hearted, he 
died. 

But his idea was a living truth and it prevailed. Slowly 
indeed it has made its way through all the lands of civili- 
zation, and especially in the very country from which it was 
banished, and now Froebel, like Pestalozzi and Rousseau 
before him, has been apotheosized, where but a generation 
ago he was left to struggle and to starve. 

The kindergartern was originally planned to systematize 
in the schools the moral influence of the home and to utilize 
the child's natural impulse to play as a means to that end. 



228 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

But with the sudden and rapid growth of the modern indus- 
trial system which has ensued during the 50 years since 
FroebePs death, his idea of utilizing the child's tendency to 
play as a means of training its moral nature was gradually 
diverted into that of training the child's industrial capacities. 
The kindergarten became developed mainly in its manual 
training features, and this idea has been enlarged upon in 
our manual training schools. 

The Gill School Republic Method of Moral Training 

And now comes another altruist and carries this great 
educational idea forward to its logical conclusion and original 
purpose. 

The Gill School Republic is the full development of the 
Froebelian idea of educating the young through the training 
of their inner impulses, that is to say, through the right di- 
rection of their spontaneous activities. This the school 
republic does in the one most important direction of self- 
government and self-control through the substitution of 
spontaneous effort in place of arbitrary coercion and control. 
It is not a means of manual training. We have that well 
established. It is a means of moral training, of which our 
children, especially in the condition of modern city life, have 
more than ever need. 

What Shall We Do? 

Shall we in this morning- glow of the 20th century, with the 
ample light of past experience to guide us, stand by and see 
the story of Pestalozzi and Froebel repeated before our eyes? 
Shall we let the school republic idea languish through our 
generation only to be realized and its author glorified by the 
next? Let me emphasize the question and suggest the answer 
by a quotation from the great German poet and philosopher, 
Goethe : 

Only Sure Way 

"With a mature generation there is never much to be done, 
neither in things material nor spiritual, neither in matters 
of taste nor of character. Be ye wise and begin in the schools, 
and then it will go." And have we not learned from the 



Gold Medal — Addresses 229 

history of educational methods, that our appeal is not so much 
to educators, who, if their inertia and conservatism will 
permit to be friendly, are practically helpless, but to the 
Government? We must look to our statesmen to make all 
necessary provision for opening the schools to the benefits of 
this better way. 



"Rational, Practical, Dramatic, Ethical" 
Rev. Thomas R. Slicer 

At the Franklin Institute's banquet in the interest of the 
School Republic, the leading speaker was the Rev. Thomas 
R. Slicer, of New York, who, as chairman of the Municipal 
Committee of the City Club, has been a prominent factor 
for some years in civic reform. His address of about an hour 
was full of the most telling illustrations, and was punctuated 
with enthusiastic applause by the judges, journalists, doctors, 
lawyers, clergymen, educators and most prominent business 
men of Philadelphia. Following is a brief extract from his 
address : 

Government to be taught as mechanical is only half- 
taught; all social questions are at their root moral. The 
moment a school is considered, this fact apppears, for the 
reason that schools have been administered as little mon- 
archies, of absolute government; because force is the simplest 
form of control. 

The changes in student government have steadily advanced 
from the absolute rule of the teacher to some form, more or 
less developed, of self-government by the pupils. The 
School Republic furnishes the most developed method of 
self-government, for it promotes in the school the exact 
method followed by the community. The community has 
provided the school for the young citizens. It has compelled 
education. In the School Republic it gives a reason for this 
education as self- controlled, and each school becomes, in a 
very real way, a little city of young citizens. It is no longer 
a forcing process for members of the community detached 
from the others; but this civic life goes on while new students 
acquire the knowledge which shall avail for civic life in the 
adult. 



230 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

Advantages Summed Up 
If the advantages of the system were to be summed up, 
the account would stand something in this way, as to the 
School Republic : 

1. It is rational, for it teaches the child from the be- 
ginning that he is a part of the community, with real rights 
and real duties. 

2. It is practical, for it substitutes example for theory 
and illustrates the text of the teacher by the act of the pupil. 
It is a government demonstrated by practice; it is the philos- 
ophy of government taught by example. 

3. It is dramatic and appeals to the sense for action. 
The student participates in the education which is going 
forward in the schools. 

4. It is ethical, for it teaches self-government in child- 
hood, the lesson constantly neglected in manhood. 

5. It is an aid to the teacher, for there are abundant 
testimonials to the development through the School Republic 
of a keener interest among the pupils; it is their school; 
they are responsible. It substitutes the ideals of a community 
for the discipline of a monarchy. 

6. It is an easy and effective test of the capacity, 
flexibility and real human interest of a teacher. The rule-of- 
thumb teachers "do not want it," but the teacher of that 
type is not himself wanted. The task- master still exists 
here and there, but he becomes more and more rare, while 
the guide and friend is increasing. This is the type sought 
for by those who commit their children to the teacher's care. 

Where It Succeeds Best 
Many reasons may be given for the inauguration of the 
School Republic in our schools, but the best and that which 
appeals most effectively for its adoption is that it succeeds 
best where the school is of the best type, the teacher the 
most effective, and the instruction most nearly in accord with 
the practical needs of the life the child is to live as a vital 
participant in the life of the community. 



Gold Medal — Addresses 231 

The Boldest, Strongest, Simplest Attempt to Solve the 
Great Civic Problem. 

The Rev. Dr. Charles Wood, of the Second Presbyterian 
Church, Philadelphia, now pastor of the Church of the 
Covenant, Washington, D. C, in his address at the School 
Republic banquest given by the Franklin Institute spoke in 
part as follows : 

Thus far the American theory has been that the American 
citizen inherits with citizenship all the knowledge necessary 
for the performance of all his duties. Without any instruc- 
tion or practice, at twenty-one years of age he is expected 
to exercise properly the prerogatives of a sovereign. We 
should hardly suppose him capable of playing the pianola 
without at least a half hour's instruction, and to play our 
national game we should condiser years of training necessary, 
but to enter on all the privileges of a ruler in the Republic 
nothing is demanded but a proper spirit of subserviency to 
a party which, translated, means a boss. 

The School Republic attempts to clear up all this, not by 
the slaughter of bosses, or the disintegration of parties, but 
by the education of the citizen. The whole effort is in line 
with a great movement by which the seat of authority has 
been slowly shifted in the state from the monarch to the 
people, and in the church from an ecclesiastical hierarchy to 
a book, and from a book to the individual soul. Westward 
the course of empire takes its way, but the course of authority 
takes it ways inward to reason and conscience. In the 
School Republic, spontaneous activity replaces compuslory 
obedience. The Golden Rule on which it is founded is 
accepted as the best of precepts, and the only reasonable 
and practical rule of life for civilized human beings. 

Here at least is a gleam of hope for the municipalities 
of the future. We, it may be, must continue to bear the heavy 
yoke which for 25 years the citizens of Philadelphia have 
borne unmurmuringly, but the next generation, accustomed 
in the School Republic to an actual "government of the 
people, for the people, by the people," will feel amazed pity 
for us, that persons apparently with so much intelligence, 
commercial and professional, should have allowed themselves 



232 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

so long to be hypnotized into a cruel and degrading bondage. 
The School Republic is the boldest, the strongest, 
the simplest attempt yet made to solve the great civic 
problem. 

A Tremendous Gain 

Dr. Martin G. Brumbaugh, a professor in the University 
of Pennsylvania, now superintendent of public schools in 
Philadelphia, not being able to attend the Franklin Institute 
School Republic banquet, sent the following statement of 
his views for publication in that connection : 

The formal activities of a school must always include in- 
struction and discipline. By instruction one understands that 
sum of effort through which the pupil achieves knowledge 
and its attendant virtues, skill and efficiency. By discipline 
one should understand that sum of mental activities by which 
the mind becomes facile and its powers formed for use. But 
by the majority of persons discipline is regarded as those 
coercive acts, negative in character, which the school puts 
forth to maintain right conditions for instruction. This 
latter view is fundamentally false. There must be no con- 
flict between the instruction and the discipline of the school. 
Both should be constructive. Our schools need a new 
motive for discipline, to the end that they may make all 
the school's activities educational. 

If, then, we can make discipline as significant educationally 
as we now make instruction significant, we shall have gained 
much. Any plan that aims to accomplish this end is well 
worth the sympathetic concern of all educators. The 
School Republic is, in its conception, such a plan. 

It is manifestly wise to regard with favor an activity that 
offers so much helpful guidance to our pupils, both in 
giving positive educational value to discipline and in 
giving this educational guidance a specific determination 
to citizenship. The usual activities of the school in aca- 
demic interests will thus be supplemented by an actual 
training in citizenship. This is a tremendous gain, and 
we must assuredly commend any such activity as will ac- 
complish this much-needed and much-neglected result. 



CHAPTER VII 

HEADMASTERS' SCHOOL REPUBLIC BANQUET 

City Superintendent Brooks Presiding 
Boston City Club, October 18, 1910 

A Practical Agency in Moral and Civic Education 

Dr. David Snedden 
State Commissioner of Education 

NO doubt exists that our complex, economic life and the 
scientific spirit of the age, coupled with the desire 
that democratic government be rendered more 
effective, require greatly increased attention to civic and 
moral training, so far as leatt as public agencies are concerned. 

The forms of social education based on authority are less 
and less operative. The bases of citizenship must be to an 
increasing extent, intelligence and social insight. 

It is easy to teach the dogmas of morality and the rules 
of conduct. It is easy for teachers to outline courses of ideal 
behavior, but it is a vastly different thing to translate these 
into habitual courses of action, and to inspire the right 
motives for conduct. 

We are learning now that vocational education, to be ef- 
fective, means not supplementing the book with the labora- 
tory, but rather basing the book on shop practice; similarly 
in moral and civic education, practice must precede theory, 
and the growing child learns by experience what it is to par- 
ticipate in the group life of the community. 

The home, the church, the street, the workshop and the 
school are the agencies of moral and civic training. In some 
of these, the opportunity for exemplifying the civic life are 
not what they once were. It is a possible mission for the 
school to organize the group life, and to cause the children 
to live through the experiences of civic action on a plane 

233 






234 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

which forms good habits, stimulates ideals, and increases the 
capacity and disposition to seek the basis of civic conduct in 
an intelligent way. It is acknowledged that the school is 
already a miniature society. Because of conditions sur- 
rounding it, it often tends to become a clan-like society, 
with large elements of secrecy, and a tendency to become anti- 
social, so far as the large world of society is concerned. It 
is entirely possible to render self-concious this society, and 
to inspire it at all times with loftier aims. 

Mr. Gill in his School Republic aims at just this end; he 
provides a mechanism simple and easily operated at 
first, by means of which the children will live through the 
experiences of making laws, of passing them under judgment, 
and enforcing them. The miniature social community be- 
becomes a miniature state, and the children learn to ap- 
preciate self-made laws, and to contribute to their enforce- 
ment. I am profoundly convinced of the Tightness of his 
ideals, and of the fact that they are in line with the best 
sociological thinking of our time. 

The future belongs not to government by authority, but 
government by intelligence; and government by intelligence 
comes only through the exercise of mind upon the actual 
problems of the world. 



The Real Trouble With the Boy of the Present 

James P. Munroe 
Executive Director of "Boston 1915" 

It is the fashion to day, as it has been for a good many years 
for business men to complain that in spite of the great sums 
spent on education, the boy and young man is not well fitted 
to take up the affairs of business life. These complainants 
maintain that even college graduates cannot write and spell 
properly, cannot compose a good letter and do not seem to 
learn the details of a business as rapidly as their employers 
think they should. So far as concerns the mechaincal pro- 
cesses of writing, spelling and composing, these men of 
business are mistaken. There are ample proofs to show that 



Addresses in Boston 235 

our fathers and grandfathers were not nearly so competent 
in these directions as are the youth of today. 

The real trouble with the boy of the present is not with 
his lessons, it is with his mental and moral discipline. He 
used to get it at home, he now generally gets it on the street. 
He used to be held responsible for chores and other work at 
home which is now done by hired helpers. In those days 
when people lived in towns instead of cities, the boy attended 
town meetings, now as a rule he gets no glimpse whatever of 
politics except through the distorted atmosphere of "peanut 
politics." 

What the modern boy lacks, therefore, is not information or 
brains, it is discipline. Without knowing it, he realizes this 
lack himself and tries to secure self discipline through various 
forms of athletics and through organization into so-called 
"gangs." 

It is true that the school boy is under pertty strict disci- 
pline in the average school but unfortunately it is of the 
wrong kind. Because of the large numbers to be taken care 
of, this discipline has to be of the military type, which is bad 
for a boy since it represses him, makes a machine of him and 
prepares him to be willing to take orders from political bosses. 

This kind of training is especially bad for boys who are going 
into any kind of active business or manufacturing, for the 
fellow who amounts to anything must have initiative, hustle 
and a sense of personal responsibility. The trouble with 
most boys in stores and factories is that they are too ready to 
take orders without understanding what these orders mean; to 
regard their work as merely a disagreeable means of securing 
their week's pay and to not realize that they have any per- 
sonal responsibility towards the welfare and development of 
the concern that employs them. 

The general plan presented by Mr. Gill recognizes this 
fundamental difficulty and meets it in the proper way by 
teaching the child even in the kindergarten how to discipline 
himself and how to assume responsibility. It was the town 
meeting that developed the free spirit and the capacity for 
self government of the American people and an application 
of that town meeting principle to our schools is bound to 



236 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

result in the same sort of good for growing boys and girls. 

By teaching them how to organize themselves under the 
general lines of our municipal and state governments they 
will not only get an insight into the meaning of government 
that in our cities can be given in no other way but they will 
also, under the guise of enjoying themselves, really subject 
one another to the one kind of discipline that is usually ef- 
fective with young people, the discipline which they enforce 
upon one another. 

There is no doubt, therefore, that in Mr. Gill's plan lies 
the principle by which our schools are going eventually to 
solve this hard problem of teaching children self-reliance and 
of developing in them a feeling of responsibility towards their 
political duties and towards the work that they must do. 



The Schools Must Do More for Citizenship 
Assistant Superintendent F. V. Thompson 

The School Republic plan which we have listened to this 
evening contains a principle which no schoolmaster can afford 
to ignore. The principle has already been adequately set 
forth. A school which does not in some way embody the 
principle in its practise is not filling its proper function in 
the community. Good schools, to my mind, do carry out 
this principle, consciously or unconsciously. I am not one 
of those who would seek to require every school to adopt the 
same application of principle, no matter how successful some 
individual had been with my plan. 

Many people need very little formal pupil organization. 
Some schools are so quiet and orderly and happy that the 
imposition of an elaborate machinery for maintaining order 
would be ludicrous. I have in mind a certain girl's grammar 
school in Boston where the conditions are so perfect, the 
discipline so easy and natural, and the whole atmosphere 
so sweet and serene that an organization for the purpose of 
securing order would be utterly unnecessary, but even in 
such a school as this, there should be some organization for 
the sake of practice in self- activity and training in citizen- 
ship. 



Addresses in Boston 237 

The boys in particular, should have free scope for their 
natural instincts of self- direction, and the direction of their 
fellows. We are looking more and more to the schools for the 
betterment of the race. We are coming to see more and more 
clearly that the school is the only social institution which 
influences all our future citizens. We start all our social 
propaganda in the schools. The mayor appeals to the school 
children to assist in keeping the streets clean. We center 
our tuberculosis campaign in the schools. Certainly the civic 
problem of cities is of such importance that the schools may 
justly be expected to do their share. The schools must do 
more for the cause of citizenship. 



Practical Training for Citizenship 

Superintendent H. R. Williams 

Wenham, Massachusetts 

After six years' experience with Mr. Wilson L. Gill's 
laboratory method of training in social and civic relations, 
I have no hesitation in recommending it as the ideal way to 
teach citizenship in all its practical forms touching the im- 
mediate life of the children and of the school. 

We are coming more and more to believe that the best prep- 
aration for life is participation in life. And in nothing is 
this more true than in training for citizenship. We may talk 
about and teach citizenship as much as we like, and still fail 
to make good citizens. But the school republic call it 
what you may, state, city, town, village, or what not, gives an 
opportunity and practically the only one possible for partici- 
pation in and practice under systematic training of good active 
citizenship. 

It gives the children something to do, and children like 
to do things. Inspector Hughes, to Toronto, Canada, says, — 
"Children like to do things; they like to do things they plan 
themsleves, and they like to do things in co-operation with 
others." The school republic gives opportunity for all this. 

What does the school republic teach? 

1. It teaches co-operation. 



238 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

The children have a systematic method for working with 
the teachers for bettering conditions in and around the 
school and neighborhood. They are given an opportunity to 
plan to this end, and they like to do things they plan them- 
selves. Instead of being required to do things, they are 
led to do them through co-operation. 

2. It teaches profound respect for law. 

When, children make their own laws, no matter how simple, 
they are most active in seeing that these laws are enforced, 
and they realize the value and the necessity of enforcing all 
law. And it is only a step from the little school community 
to the community of adult life. 

3. It teaches respect for authority. 

Being in some considerable degree in authority themselves 
the children soon see the need of respect for authority. It 
is truly surprising, too, to see to what extent children will 
submit to the authority of their own officers. The reason is 
not hard to see. They feel that it is their own government, 
and not the rule of an autocratic, monarchic teacher, who, 
many times without explanation, says "Do this" or "Do 
that" as though it were for her special gratification that she 
required the things to be done. 

4. It teaches self-control. 

By this method it is possible to get a marked degree of 
self-control. Good conduct originates with the children and 
becomes an inner process tending outward, in place of outward 
cnotrol that never reaches beyond seeming response to that 
control. Children who attain to a high standard of conduct 
through the desire to do well are vastly better morally than 
those who passively submit to outward control. 

5. It teaches active interest in the welfare of school and 
neighborhood. 

Just as many people are called good becasue they do no 
noticeably wrong things, so many children are counted good 
when they do not break the rules of the school. This kind 
of goodness comes far short of bettering conditions either in 
school or in the activities of life. What is needed is active 
goodness; not only being, but doing good; setting one's 
self patiently and persistently in favor of the right and against 



Addresses in Boston 239 

the wrong. When it becomes known that nine-tenths of the 
pupils believe in doing right, most of the remaining tenth 
will be forced into line through the actively expressed public 
opinion. 

6. It teaches the meaning of civil government. 

Through the organization of the school republic the child- 
ren come into close and interesting touch with the official 
life of the town and city. The simple duties devolving upon 
the mayor, city clerk, judge, chief of police, and many other 
officers open the eyes of all the young citizens to the larger 
duties of officials in actual life; or rather, in the larger com- 
munity life, for the little school community is actual life to 
the boys and girls. 

The school republic court is one of the best things in the 
whole organization, for it brings forcibly to the children a 
right conception of that institution, namely, that it means 
or ought to mean, justice for every citizen. There is great 
need that this idea should find place in the mind of every 
lover of this great country of ours. 

7. It teaches the value and use of the ballot. 

This is another great need in American citizenship. How 
many men fail to realize, when the time comes to cast their 
ballots at the polls, what a privilege they enjoy and what 
power they possess. What an opportunity to teach boys and 
girls the duties of citizens in this great department of Ameri- 
can government, when they actually exercise the voting 
franchise a number of times each year, to elect officers and to 
enact laws and ordinances. 

8. It inspires confidence. 

The school republic method of pupil participation in 
school management inspires the highest confidence. When 
are we going to stop distrusting our boys and girls? When are 
we going to treat them in school as we treat them in the home? 
Confidence in children begets confidence, and the results that 
have been seen in this one thing prove beyond a doubt the 
value of the school republic. 

Kot the least of the many advantages of democratic govern- 
ment in the school is the fact that discipline, as we usually 
think of it, is reduced to a minimum. 



240 A New Citizenship— Appendix 

Many of the advantages named above tend in the direction 
of waht the school ought always to be, — a place of serious 
pleasure. Children feel that the school is theirs, and that 
it is pleasant for them in so far as they make it so. 

The time usually spent in disciplining the school can be 
spent in teaching the duties of officers and citizens and in 
seeing that these duties are performed. It exemplifies the 
principle that if children are kept busy, the discipline will 
take care of itself. 

The school republic socializes the school. All these duties 
that the children perform bring them together in an entirely 
different way from that of the recitation or even of the 
playground. They learn that the Golden Rule must be ap- 
plied in all their conduct and in all their dealings as officers 
and citizens, and they soon find that it is best to have proper 
regard for the rights of others. 

Through the exercise of the functions of citizenship and 
government the young people are prepared for their places in 
the social and civic life of the adult community. They will 
fill these places far better than they otherwise could, be- 
cause they have learned the lessons which the school republic 
teaches them through participation in the school life of their 
own social and civic community, of which the school is the 
large and dominating part. 

My six years' experience with Mr. Gill's system of moral 
and civic training has convinced me beyond all question that 
his contention is correct, that "the element of democracy 
based on the practice of the Golden Rule, is necessary for 
best conditions and results for rational human beings from 
their babyhood through life, and that without it, families, 
schools, industrial and mercantile establishments, and even 
the army cannot have the highest type of co-operation and 
obedience to law and authority, and that this is absolutely 
necessary for the greatest efficiency of any such organization." 




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Above: ordinary way at Indian schools of hanging- towels all in con- 
tact, tending to spread eye and skin troubles. This illustrates slightly 
how children are trained away from independent ownership and responsi- 
bility, are institutionalized and made dependent. Below: same wash room, 
a step toward individual ownership, responsibility and personal indepen- 
dence. When the boys were organized as a republic, their board of public 
works made a separate compartment for each boy, in which to keep 
his towel, brush and comb, tooth brush, soap, etc. See page 204. 



CHAPTER VIII 

CLERGYMEN AND 
DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

Urged by Clergymen 

IN March, 1905, fifteen clergymen of different denomina- 
tions in Washington D. C, signed a petition asking the 
Board of Education to introduce the Ten Command- 
ments and certain other religious teachings into the curriculum 
of the public schools. Thereupon, the entire body of Baptist 
ministers signed a remonstrance, protesting that such action 
would be in the direction of sectarian teaching in the schools. 
The ministers of the Methodist Church South took like action, 
as did the Unitarians and clergymen of some other denomi- 
nations, and the Board accorded this large protesting party 
a hearing on April 25. 

In the meantime, some one acquainted with the School 
Republic explained it to the clergymen of both of the opposing 
parties, and all agreed that it furnished common ground for 
all to stand on, and was all and more than any of them had 
hoped to get. Prominent members of the first party said 
if the second party would offer the School Republic in place 
of the original demand for religious teaching, they, instead of 
opposing, would support the new movement, and Hon. 
Simon Wolf, ex- Minister to Egypt, representing the entire 
second party, after a lengthy argument showing that com- 
pliance with the request of the fifteen clergymen would be 
subversive of civil and religious liberty and the Constitution 
of the United States, asked that the Board would, for the 
protection of American institutions and to improve the moral 
tone of the community, take measures for the successful 
and permanent introduction of the School Republic into all 
the schools of the District of Columbia. 241 



242 A New Citizenship— Appendix 

The following petition was presented at the same meeting : 

Petition of the D. A. R. 

To the Honorable Board of Education of the 

District of Columbia 

On Saturday, April 22, 1905, at the close of the Fourteenth 
Continental Congress of the National Society of the Daughters 
of the American Revolution, numbering over fifty thouasnd 
grand-daughters and great- grand- daughters of the officers 
and soldiers of the Army of the Revolution, who crowned 
eight years of fighting, suffering and death for liberty and 
popular government with the Constitution of the United 
States, this Congress unanimously, thoughtfully, earnestly, 
enthusiastically and with a fixed determination, — full of the 
spirit of the Revolution, — adopted the following preambles 
and resolutions, as a fitting climax of fifteen years of thought 
and endeavor in the cause of intelligent and independent 
American citizenship : 

"Whereas, It is essential for]the well-being and pres- 
ervation of our form of government that the children 
of our country shall be trained in the knowledge and 
practice of pure and noble citizenship; and 

Whereas, This matter is not adequately provided 
for in the present curriculum of the schools; 

Resolved, That this Congress direct the appointment 
of a special committee by the President- General to 
promote the introduction of the School Republic 
into all the schools in the United States." 

During and following the Civil War there was a large 
emigration of freedmen from the plantations to the city of 
Washington. Unprincipled men were able to control their 
votes, and the political situation became so unfortunate 
that the Congress of the United States, for self-preservation, 
found it necessary, in this reservation of land for govern- 
mental purposes, to withdraw the elective franchise from the 
people. As a result of this, children who are born at the 
very heart of the nation are brought up without any example 
before them of the responsibilities of American citizenship. 
What little they are taught of it is academic, as if it were of 



Daughters of American Revolution 243 

Rome or Greece, and that alone can have no possible rela- 
tion to the spirit of their lives as American citizens. 

Mr. Roosevelt, now Prseident of the United States, par- 
ticipated in the first School Republic experiment in 1897, 
which proved a thorough success for its civic and moral 
purpose. The United States Government introduced it into 
the schools of Cuba. The President, within a year, has 
written of his knowledge and earnest approval of the School 
Republic. 

In view of all this, and that other and important reasons 
may be cited in favor of giving the children of the District 
of Columbia so much of a taste of the responsibilities and 
privileges of American citizenship, we most respectfully and 
earnestly request that you take such measures as will in- 
sure the introduction and permanent success of the School 
Republic in all of the schools of the District. 

Respectfully yours, 

Caroline M. Murphy, Chairman, 
Julia B. Foraker, Vice- Chairman. 



CHAPTER IX 

EDITORIAL COMMENTS 

THE support of the press, editorially, that has been 
given to the School Republic method of moral and 
civic training has been most generous. Magazines, 
newspapers, educational journals and the religious press of 
all denominations have given their fullest approval and en- 
couragement. This has occurred not only in our country, 
but in many lands. The following editorials and extracts 
are typical of the large volume which has appeared : 

In France and Spain — From The Havana Post 

The Cuban government being the first in the world to 
undertake the training of all the people while children to 
enjoy the privileges of citizenship and to perform its duties, 
it is especially interesting to see that the Heraldo de Madrid 
is advocating for Spain the same course we are pursuing 
with such happy results, which are familiar not only to all 
people in Havana who read the papers, but to all who have 
children in the schools, and those who have observed the 
neater appearance and better conduct of the boys in the 
streets. The Heraldo article is inspired by an article in the 
Paris Figaro, and is as follows: 

Civic Education for the Rustic 

The distinguished novelist, Marcel Prevost, who in his 
odd hours treats of political and social problems, and in a 
very advanced and radical manner, which he demonstrated 
during the famous Dreyfus case, in which he figured by the 
side of Zola, Anatole France, Octave Mirabeau, Reclus, 
Jaures, Clemenceau, Clartie, the sacred legion who combated 
for truth and justice, has published in Le Figaro a very notable 
article, L'Education des Petits Paysans de France" — the 
education of the little peasants of France. 

244 



Editorials 245 

It is known that in the French chamber there has been 
presented a project, on which no definite decision has re- 
sulted, to secure the integrity of the suffrage. 

Two methods dispute the solution of the problem, that of 
casting the vote inside of an envelope and that of isolating 
each voter in a booth in order that he may not be influenced 
or coerced by those interested in perverting his will and con- 
science. 

The gist of the problem is that the rural elector will not 
vote. He will mutilate the ballot or leave it blank when they 
oblige him to enclose his vote in an envelope or leave him 
alone in a booth to meditate on what his conscience dictates, 
in a general, departmental, or municipal election. 

To decide for this or the other party, this or that form 
of government, is difficult not only for a rural elector, but 
it is so for higher intelligences, and consciences more en- 
lightened. The eminent Taine said in the preface of his 
great work, "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine," 
that the greatest difficulty of his life was when, in 1858, at 
the foundation of the second republic, his vote was asked 
and he did not know for what and for whom to vote; whether 
the nation ought to organize itself after the type and plan 
of a middle-class house, an aristocratic palace, a barrack, 
a phalanstery, or simply a camp of savages. 

The rural elector is in France, as in almost every country, 
the number, the force, the mass, and he goes on elaborating 
slowly, unconsciously, the real national constitution, which 
is not written anywhere. The future of a country, and 
peculiarly so if its democratic organization is fundamental, 
belongs to the rural population, without which there is no 
durable legislation, nor in reality is anything changed, ex- 
cept on the surface. 

Marcel Prevost says, with profound knowledge of the 
structure and essence of modern peoples, that in vain are 
decrees made and laws multiplied and constitutions pro- 
mulgated, if the mass of the working people, and especially 
those of the country, are not associated in the work. The 
fourth estate is that which, in the last, governs, and the secret 
as to whether a society progresses or stagnates, depends on 



246 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

whether or not the reforms penetrate into the brains and 
hearts of the rural electors. 

The legislators, he adds, who ten years after the war 
wished to establish in France the democratic regime, per- 
ceived well the point of the difficulty. At the base of the 
political edifice they placed the instruction of the rural 
laborer. To-day the peasant of twenty years, in all the 
municipalities of France, can read, write and count. Ren- 
ovated from top to bottom, the pedagogic methods are 
admirable. But it is not complete, for in the deskful of books 
which the child carries to school, there is lacking one volume, 
little as it may be, the civic manual, the epitome of the rights 
and duties of the citizen. 

It is clear that the civic instruction of the peasant does 
not require a great number of lessons. Beyond the culti- 
vation of the earth he neeed not mix in the functions of social 
life, except as soldier, as elector, and as juror. The state 
confiscates three years of his life, in which to teach him the 
vocation of a soldier. As elector and juror he serves his 
apprenticeship without any one to help him or to reach him 
a protecting hand before he comes to the ballot box and 
before he must serve on the jury. There is too much aban- 
donment; there is too much confidence in his natural dis- 
cernment and independence. Thus it results that the rural 
people know only by halves, and for the most part very badly, 
the duties of electors and jurors. 

It has been proclaimed in the French chamber, and by 
no less an authority than the great statesman Waldeck- 
Rousseau, president of the council of ministers, that the 
rural elector does not know how to vote, because in most 
cases he is ignorant of the material act; for, though he can 
write, he does not know how to put the name he prefers 
on the ticket and how to deposit it in the ballot-box. So 
that the more the act of voting is complicated, the less will 
be the probability of ascertaining the true will of the people. 

And for that condition, what is the remedy? The remedy, 
according to Marcel Prevost, as well as all others who think 
seriously and honestly on this grave problem, is in the pri- 
mary school, because here is the only possible place in which 



Editorials 247 

to teach the rural laborer how to perform his duties as a 
voter and juror. 

Of course it is not proposed to establish in the primary 
school a course of political economy and law. 

If in the primary school the child is exercised in the prac- 
tical duties of the voter and juror, he will be delighted, as 
well as instructed, by these lessons, which will form in 
him the spirit of the citizen and accustom him, little by little, 
to decipher the mysteries of his high mission in the world, 
as partaker in a sovereignty, in a power, as an integral 
part of the government. If in the schools they train a child 
as a soldier, there should be no grave inconvenience or in- 
superable difficulty in training him as an elector and juror. 
If they can teach military exercises there is no reason for 
not instructing the child in the mode of voting and judging. 
If it is necessary to train the child in military practices in 
the schools, it is doubly necessary to train him in perform- 
ing the practical duties of the elector and juror, because, 
if the former may possibly be of practical use to him at some 
time in his life, the latter are sure to be indispensable at 
all times during his mundane existence, and there is no reason 
why this practical civic training should not be in the curricu- 
lum of the schools. 

This theme, which M. Prevost develops in a masterly 
manner in his article in Le Figaro, and which we submit for 
the consideration and study of those who, in Spain, wish to 
occupy themselves with the future of our democratic in- 
stitutions, is Universal Suffrage and the Jury, without 
whose honest exercise in perfect freedom, independence and 
intelligence, no country is free. 

MM. Marcel Prevost and Waldeck-Rousseau lament that 
the rural elector in France lacks capacity and intelligence 
in his august office of voter and juror, and that in a country 
where, according to these same gentlemen, backed by statis- 
tics, every elector can read and write. What would be said 
here, in a nation of illiterates; here, where twelve million 
Spaniards, out of sixteen millions, are deprived of the most 
elementary instruction, not knowing even the alphabet? 



248 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

Citizenship a Vocation 
Editorial in the Boston Common. 

Great emphasis is being placed just now, and properly, 
upon vocational training in the public schools. How many 
realize that citizenship itself is a voaction — the greatest of 
all vocations; the one on which all other vocations should be 
based; the only one that it is the duty of every individual 
to learn? 

While one does not earn money by this vocation, as by 
all other vocations, the constant and intelligent practice of 
it is absolutely necessary for the defense of his earnings, to 
prevent too much being absorbed by the local government 
and misused after it has been taken from him. 

The prime object of our system of public schools, academies, 
colleges and universities is to teach the vocation of citizen- 
ship, yet they are not teaching it. Our statesmen and our 
educators have not yet waked up to the fact that citizenship 
is a voaction. No person in Massachusetts has been sys- 
tematically trained in this foundation vocation of vocations. 
Only a few in some schools scattered through the State are 
now getting the first of such training. 

There are no properly trained citizens in Massachusetts — 
there having been no means since the early days of our 
republic for such training. The means of that time — con- 
stant contact of the father with his children and with their 
mother — has long since disappeared. Our statesmen and 
our educators should have recognized this fifty or a hundred 
years sgo. 

The progress and developing of the school system from 
the time of the little country school house with its session 
of two or three months a year to the present, with our great 
palaces of education, marks exactly the decline of democracy 
in our land and its being supplanted by boss rule. This 
could never have been, had all our statesmen and educators 
been awake to the fact that citizenship is a practical art, 
and must be provided for in the schools, as rapidly as the 
schools supplant the contact of the father with his family, 
made necessary by the new vocations which are the result of 
the introduction of the steam engine and machinery. 



Editorials 249 

There are three classes of those who have the right to 
vote. The largest consists of those who have not been trained 
in the higher schools and colleges to think independently 
for themselves, and whose business life is spent carrying 
out the orders of foremen, and who in their political life 
attend primaries and local elections obeying the orders of 
their political superiors. This great body is the brawn and 
sinews of machine government or boss rule. 

The second of the three great classes consists of those 
who have been trained to think for themselves, but do not 
attend primaries and local elections, and thus deprive our 
country of this means of defending its democracy. These 
men have been trained at home and in the schools from 
their birth till their graduation from college, to be the sub- 
jects of government in which they have no part, except to 
obey. While our statesmen and educators have been blind 
to the fact, the "bulwarks of our liberty," the public schools 
and colleges, have been training their political victims in 
the habits of subjection without responsibility for the con- 
ditions in which they live. 

There should be no victims of our educational system. 
All should be beneficiaries, trained to be obedient to laws 
for which they are responsible; to understand and defend 
their rights by lawful means; to understand and defend 
other persons' rights; to understand that every right has a 
corresponding duty and to perform that duty; and to co- 
operate for every good purpose. 

The third and smallest of the great classes consists of 
tag ends of the two other classes, an undrilled, unstable 
quantity of educated patriotic men who have broken out of 
the crystallization imposed upon them by the schools, and 
thus are able to act according to the academic teaching of 
the schools, instead of in accord with the practical training 
received there, in subjection without participation in the 
government; and of those men of the first class who are 
rebels against the existing government of the machine, and 
assert their independence at the polls. 

A juncture has been reached in educational affairs. The 
old academic forms must give way in part to vocational 



250 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

training. Let us beg and pray that Massachusetts will not 
allow the colossal blunder to be made of failing to recognize 
that citizenship is not only a vocation, but it is the vocation 
of all vocations, in which every person should be trained for 
the safety of every other vocation, for the defence of our 
liberty, our life and the pursuit of happiness, for a return 
of our people to the high democracy, won by the Revolutionary 
War, but now in large measure lost to boss rule and machine 
government, but which alone can make possible peace and 
prosperity at home and abroad, and that universal interna- 
tional co-operation for every good purpose, which will usher 
in that higher, better civilization to which we are looking 
forward with straining eyes and longing hearts. 

Teaching Citizenship 
Editorial in The North American, April 23, 1910 

In a tragic hour in the life of the great German people, 
when Prussia was doggedly staggering up from the earth 
to which she had been crushed by the conquering Napoleon, 
the sovereign called upon a famous philosopher to aid him 
in reorganizing the stricken kingdom. 

It was then that Humboldt said: "Whatever you would 
put into the state, you must first put into the schools." 

This principle is one which appeals with peculiar force 
to the American mind, intent upon the problems of self- 
government and keenly-alive to the realtions between public 
education and citizenship. 

Throughout the country and from the beginning of its 
history as a nation, the people have understood that the 
success or failure of the American experiment depended 
largely on the efficiency of the schools in teaching self-govern- 
ment. 

This conviction is so innate and ingrained that it arises 
in some instances to the degree of a passion. Patriotism is 
jealous of the public schools, because it recognizes the fact 
that if free government is to live, the state must insist on 
training the youth to the proper exercise of the functions 
of citizenship in a democracy. 

Yet the popular mind has but a hazy idea of just how the 



Editorials 251 

schools are to teach partiotism, and through it self-govern- 
ment. Indeed, the general opinion seems to be that the 
faculty of self-government must necessarily come with the 
patriotic impulse. 

A reverence for the outward forms, a hysterical shouting 
for the symbols of freedom apart from freedom itself, the 
saluting of the flag and the singing of patriotic songs have 
been looked upon as the groundwork of patriotism, the sure 
defense of national integrity and popular liberty. 

And yet the path of history is strewn with the corpses of 
free communities slain while they shouted for their flag or 
whatever symbol of patriotism served in their age. 

It was this experience of the nations that the wise old 
Englishman had in mind when he said that "Patriotism is 
the last refuge of a scoundrel." There never lived a more 
patriotic man that Samuel Johnson, but he read the lessons 
of history, and he knew the despots had from time imme- 
morial used the popular love for native land as a means to 
divert the people from the true conditions while fetters were 
being forged for their limbs. 

It is the testimony of candid and sympathetic observers 
of the American experiment that democratic government 
has broken down in the cities. And it has been almost the 
unanimous testimony of these observers that this failure 
has been due to two classes of citizens. First, those who 
neglect to exercise their rights either at the primary or general 
elections or both; and second, those who never fail to cast 
their ballot, but who always vote as directed by some one 
to whom they look as an authority in political matters. 

The result has been that in a general way we have had in 
out cities not government by the people, but government by 
an oligarchy, and in some instances even government by an 
individual will, which means monarchy without the responsi- 
bility that a legitimate monarch must assume. 

In every discussion as to the best method of arousing the 
citizenship of cities to an interest in the functions of their 
government, the schools have been a primary consideration. 
In each of the two formal meetings thus far held by the new 
Patriotic Society of Philadelphia, a speaker, one unknown 



252 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

to the other, has quoted from the German philosopher that 
the things which we would put into the state must first be put 
into the schools. One of these speakers was Dr. Brumbaugh. 

Professor L. S. Rowe, president of the American Academy 
of Social and Political Science, went a step further toward 
defining what the function of the schools should be in teach- 
ing citizenship. Professor Rowe said: 

The responsibility of teaching civics is not discharged 
when we have taught children the structure of government 
or the history of the country. History should be taught, 
not to instil contentment with present conditions, but to 
develop a sense of obligation to the future of the city. Train 
the imagination as well as the intellect, so that the mind 
can see not only what the city has been, but what it can be 
and must be. Create a fruitful discontent. Let this society 
be a conference of those engaged in teaching civics so that 
they may hold up a definite civic ideal to which our conduct 
must conform. 

It is something of a curious conicidence that it was through 
another organization bearing the name the Patriotic League, 
the name which was first adopted by the local society, that 
the idea of teaching citizenship through the actual exercise 
of its functions was first given to the world. 

The inventor of the plan was Wilson L. Gill, LL. B. Pro- 
fessor Gill's idea is that it is not enough to teach children the 
structure of government and the history of the country. 
But neither is it enough to teach them the abstract principles 
of good citizenship. The schools have not fulfilled their 
full duty until they have taught self-government by making 
the children self-governing. 

His apt illustration of the principle involved is the teach- 
ing of chemistry. A student might listen for years to lectures 
on chemistry, but he never could be a chemist until he had 
done the actual work in the laboratory. 

So with the youth of the nation. All the lectures and 
textbooks in the land on self-government will not fit them 
for citizenship in a free democracy unless the theoretical 
knowledge is supplemented by actual practice in governing 
themselves. 



Editorials 253 

Mr. Gill's plan is to organize every school into a little 
republic, and to put the responsibility for its government 
upon the pupils. It is not merely a play city, to teach the 
children the forms of government. It is a genuine, self 
governing community. And while it teaches forms, its im- 
portant function is to teach the spirit of democracy, the 
responsibility of the individual to the community, and to 
cultivate in the minds of the children the habits of self- 
government itself. 

Under the conventional methods of school discipline the 
children are ruled by an absolute despotism, as they are in 
the parental home. They become accustomed to taking 
their rule from a higher power. They go into the world as 
men and women without ever having had a single exercise 
in self-government. Their habits of thought are formed in 
youth, and they continue through life to look for their govern- 
ment, not in themselves, but in some leader. Thus is bossism 
woven into the very fabric of our institutions, and irregular 
monarchy made the rule of our cities. 

The experience of those who organized school cities on 
Mr. Gill's plan has been that the children showed eagerness 
to make just laws, and avidity in enforcing them. They 
wanted to do the right thing. The problems of school 
discipline were greatly simplified. But the chief benefit was 
the training of young citizens in actual self-government. 

The idea won the award of the Elliott- Cresson gold medal, 
the highest honor given by the Franklin Institute. School 
cities were established in Philadelphia. At one time there 
were more than thirty here. But without official support it 
was impossible to continue the work, and those that have 
been able to survive are less than half a dozen. 

But the idea has spread. Many school cities have been 
organized in New York, especially among the children of 
the foreign quarters. There are school cities in every state 
in the Union, in Hawaii, in Cuba, in Europe, Asia, Africa 
and South America. When Theodore Roosevelt was Presi- 
dent he wrote a letter commending the teaching of citizen- 
ship through the plan of self-governing schools. 

The Patriotic League — not the Philadelphia society, but 



254 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

the national organization, which is chartered under law of 
Congress, and numbers among its members such men as 
Leonard Wood, Jacob Riis, Ben. B. Lindsey, George Dewey 
and Gifford Pinchot — has given its approval to the school 
republic method of teaching citizenship. The Philadelphia 
Patriotic Society is seeking effective means to the same end. 
It might be worth its while to consider Humboltd's principle 
enunciated by Dr. Brumbaugh at the first meeting of the 
society, that "Whatever we would put into the state must 
first be put into the schools." 

And the school republic plan, bearing the award of the 
Franklin Institute, seems to offer a way of putting self-govern- 
ment into the schools and through the schools into the state. 

Educating in Social Relations 
The Press, Philadelphia 

The public school, as every one knows and is aware, has 
only begun to fill its full place in the work of the community. 

It began by teaching books. It must end by teaching life. 
It began with the "three R's." It must end by educating in 
social relations. 

Nothing better for this has yet been proposed than the 
School Republic, which was last night the subject of explana- 
tion and approval at a dinner given by the Franklin Institute 
to those prominent in education in Philadelphia. The civic 
organization of the school on the lines of self-government 
has now been in existence for several years in one of the schools 
of Philadelphia. The plan has been successful there. It 
succeeded in Cuba. Wherever tried, with good judgment, it 
has worked. 

The cause is plain. The School Republic follows a sound 
principle. It develops by imposing responsibility. It re- 
lates the teaching of institutions and of civic life to the daily 
life of the pupil in the schoolhouse and eslewhere. Like the 
kindergarten and manual training, it educates by employing 
the normal and personal activities of the student for educa- 
tion. It trains not by precept, but by action. 

The kindergarten, cooking, manual training were all at 
first introduced in our schools by private aid which developed 



Editorials 255 

into public support. The School Republic promises to take 
the same course. 

It .is no longer an experiment. Philadelphia ought to 
train in good citizenship by introducing it in every school. 

[The above editorial was written by Mr. Talcott Williams, 
who has been observing the development of the School 
Republic for a number of years, and is now dean of the 
Pulitzer School of Journalism of Columbia University]. 



CHAPTER X 
A BRIEF SCHOOL CITY CHARTER 

IN the earlier school city charters, I endeavored to make 
them cover as many details as practicable, and they 
were from ten to twenty such pages as these. Later it 
seemed desirable to make the charter so brief that it would 
not seem a formidable document to be read and compre- 
hended, and to hold a longer one in reserve for later study 
and suggestion. The limits of this book admit of only the 
most brief form. A longer form will be found in "Civic 
Practice for Boys and Girls," a book which I have prepared 
to be used supplementary to "The Boys and Girls" Republic." 
The latter is a text book to aid in the use of the School 
Republic method. 

g>rif00t C&ttg Charter. 

Article I. Object, Name, Territory, Citizens, Powers. 

Section 1. The object of this School City is to train the 
citizens in the practice of the Golden Rule, independence of 
character, teaching and co-operation for every good purpose, in 
school, at home and everywhere. 

Sec. 2. The Name of this School City shall be determined 
by a majority of the citizens at the time this charter is adopted. 

Sec. 3. The territory of this School City is the school and so 
much of the district in which the pupils live as is not otherwise 
provided for. 

Sec. 4. Citizens. Every child who is or shall be a pupil 
in this school room division shall be a citizen of this School City. 

Sec. 5. Powers. The city shall have the right to make, to 
enforce and to adjudicate laws. 

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Wilson Ne-ko- wan-na (16 years old), first president of the school 
republic at Kivalina, Alaska, on the Arctic coast. He was deeply inter- 
ested as a citizen and officer, and developed considerable executive ability. 
He is a reindeer apprentice and speaks English well. 



School City Charter 257 

Article II. Rights and Duties. 

Section 1. Rights. Citizens shall have the right to nominate 
and elect officers, to work and play without unlawful interruption. 

Sec. 2. Duties. It is the duty of the city to protect the rights 
of all citizens and promote the general welfare; and of citizens 
to practice the Golden Rule and be obedient to every lawful 
authority. 

Article III. 

HattiB nf tyttBonul (Eottfturt. 

Chapter I. The General Law. 

Section 1. Do good to others whatever they do to you. 
This natural law, without which no popular government can 
suceed, is the general law to which all other laws and regulations 
must conform. 

Chapter II. Things Prohibited. 

Section 1. Do no wrong to any one. 

Order 

Sec. 2. Anything which disturbs the order in halls, class- 
rooms, or in any place within the jurisdiction of this government, 
is prohibted. 

Sec. 3. Anything which is profane, rude, immodest, impure, 
impolite or unkind to any living creature is prohibited. 

Cleanliness 
Sec. 4. Anything which detracts from the neat and orderly 
appearance of our communiy is prohibited. 

Health. 
Sec. 5. Anything which detracts from the healthful conditions 
of our community is prohibited. 

Public and Private Property. 

Sec. 6. Anything which mars or destroys property is pro- 
hibited. 

Chapter III. Duties. 

Section 1 . Every citizen is in duty bound to call the attention 
of the authorities of this government to any violation of the laws. 



258 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

Chapter IV. Punishments. 

Section 1. Any citizen violating any law of this government 
shall be subject to punishment not less than a reprimand and 
not greater than a withdrawal of the rights of citizenship. 

Sec. 2. No punishment shall be carried into execution before 
it has been approved by the teacher or principal of the school, 
and then it must be put into effect promptly. 



Article IV. Officers, Nominations, Elections. 

Section 1. There shall be a Mayor to see that the laws are 
obeyed, a Judge to decide what is right and what is wrong, and 
a President of the City Council to preside over the meetings 
of the City Council. All the citizens shall be Members of the 
Council. 

Sec. 2. There may be health, police and any other officers 
that the Council shall authorize to be elected by the citizens 
or to be appointed by the Mayor. 

Article V. The Teacher. 

Section 1. The Teacher is not a citizen or officer, but teacher, 
guide and friend, whose authority is not changed and whose 
sanction is needed to validate every action of the School City. 

Sec. 2. This charter having been granted by the United 
States Government and the teacher and accepted by a majority 
of the citizens takes effect immediately. 

Date - - Mayor. 

. . Teacher. 



CHAPTER XI 
CONSTITUTION FOR SCHOOL STATE 

THE following form of a constitution is one of a number 
which I have written and are in use in many schools. 
The limits of this book admit of the printing of only 
the shortest, which will serve as a suggestion for more de- 
veloped forms. Please notice the remarks at the beginning 
of Chapter X. 

(ttflttfltttttitim of i!|* Btfytwl &Mt. 

Preamble. 

Grateful to Almighty God and to the Government of the 
United States of America for the privilege of being taught the 
principles and trained in the right practices of independent 
citizenship, economy, efficiency, justice, kindness, independence 
of character and of co-operation for every good purpose, public 
and private, we, the pupils of a Government School, do 
hereby accept and confirm the following constitution : 

Chapter I. Name, Territory, Citizenship, Elements of 

Government. 

Section 1. The name of this state may be determined by a 
majority vote of the pupils at the time of their accepting and 
ratifying this constitution. 

Sec. 2. The State may consist of all the pupils of one dor- 
mitory or it may consist of several school rooms, each being or- 
ganized as a village, town, county or city. Each city may elect a 
mayor, president of the council and judge. All the pupils of 
the room will be the council or legislative body. Clerks and other 
officers may be elected. The city may have a commission form 
of government. 259 



260 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

Sec. 3. The territory of the school state is a dormitory and 
adjacent territory, or the school district or reservation in which 
it is located. 

Sec. 4. Every pupil is a citizen of the school State and may 
be elected to office. 

Sec. 5. The government shall have a legislative, an executive 
and a judicial department and the citizens shall elect a separate 
head for each. The title of the head of the executive department 
is Governor, of the legislative department is President of the 
Legislature, of the judicial department is Chief Justice. There 
may be one clerk for the three departments, or three clerks, one 
for each department. The legislative department may establish 
other offices when needs arise. 

Sec. 6. The term of office shall be ten weeks or less. 
Sec. 7. An officer shall not be re- elected to serve more than 
two full terms in succession. 

Chapter II. Legislative Department. 

Section 1. The legislative department shall include every 
citizen. It may or it may not, as shall be decided by the superin- 
tendent or principal of the school, delegate its power in part to 
a body chosen by the citizens and to be called the State Legis- 
lature of six or more members. In a school of both boys and girls, 
in which a legislature of delegates has been established, two or 
more citizens should be elected in each room as members of the 
legislature, one half of the members being boys and the other 
half girls. 

Sec. 2. All laws, before they take effect, must receive the 
signature of the superintendent of the school and the governor, 
or in lieu of the governor's signature, a two- thirds majority of 
the legislature. 

Sec. 3. Every legislative act must be by a resolution or bill. 
Every bill shall begin with the following clause: "Be it enacted 
by the Legislature of the School State that " 

Chapter III. Executive Department. 

Section 1. The governor shall be the chief executive. It 
shall be his duty to see that the laws of the State are obeyed; to 



School State Constitution 261 

recommend to the legislature all such measures as he deems 
expedient; to appoint commissioners and heads of departments 
and remove them if there shall be cause for doing so; to submit 
his appointments to the legislature for confirmation and if the 
legislature fails to confirm an appointment, to make such new 
appointment as the legislature will confirm. 

Sec. 2. The President of the legislature shall preside at all 
meetings of the legislature and in the absence or disability of 
the governor shall perform the duties of the chief executive. 

Sec. 3. The Secretary of State shall keep the records of the 
State and unless there should be elected separate clerks of the 
legislature and court, he shall perform the duties of those offices. 

Chapter IV. Judicial Department. 

Section 1. The Chief Justice shall hold court whenever an 
occasion demands. There should be a session of the court at 
a regular time each week. If there is no business to transact, 
the justice should announce this and declare the court adjourned 
to the next regular date. 

Sec. 2. It shall be the duty of the justice to encourage brevity, 
directness, promptness of decisions and action, pleading guilty 
when guilty, a full disclosure of the truth without a demand for 
witnesses; and to discourage quibbling and all endeavor to cover 
the truth or escape justice. 

Sec. 3. A teacher should be present at every session of the 
court to suggest methods of solving the judge's problems, as if 
they were problems in arithmetic, to point out errors before a 
decision is reached and to give attention to the judgment. 

Sec. 4. Such penalties as tend to humiliate or make the of- 
fender appear ridiculous, should be avoided. The justice and all 
citizens should keep in mind the fact that the object of the court 
is not to punish but to prevent wrong doing in the future. 

Sec. 5. No sentence shall be carried into execution before it 
has been sanctioned by the teacher, principal or superintendent. 

Chapter V. Miscellaneous. 

Section 1. The part of the superintendent, principal and 
teachers is to recognize; first, that the school democracy is not 
a machine, but a method by which they may lead and train the 



262 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

pupils in independence of character and co-operation for every 
good purpose; second, that by the introduction of citizenship 
in the school, their authority is not affected in the slightest; 
third, that boys and girls in general are so earnest in their desire 
for good thought and action constructive work and right con- 
ditions, that the success or failure of the democracy, exactly 
the same as of all other school work is dependent wholly upon 
the maintained interest, respect, tact and enthusiasm of the 
superintendent, teachers and other school authorities. 

Sec. 2. A majority of the citizens of the school state, with the 
consent of the principal of the school, may adopt as amendments 
to this constitution any features which are contained in any more 
elaborate constitution which is sanctioned by the same authority 
that grants the right to adopt this constitution. Any other 
amendment o this constitution, before it takes effect should 
be sanctioned by the Supervisor of Civic Training. 

Sec. 3. This constitution shall take effect immediately. 

Date Governor. 

_ Sec. of Legislature. 

Disciplinarian or Matron. 

Superintendent. 



CHAPTER XII 

CONSTITUTION FOR FEDERAL REPUBLIC 

THE following constitution is as brief as practicable, 
for the purpose of giving the most necessary features 
of such a document, and that children may not be 
bewildered by a multitude of details. A form that goes more 
into detail may be found in "Civic Practices for Boys and 
Girls," by the same author. 

(ttnnaitttttum af a 3tei?ral (gavtvximmt 

Preamble. 

We, the pupils of a Government school, grateful to Almighty 
God that there has been granted to us by the United States Gov- 
ernment the right to enjoy the privileges and to perform the duties 
of citizenship, gladly accept and confirm this Constitution, 
to the end that we shall be trained individually in leadership 
and in teaching, and to take the initiative in private and public 
affairs; to think and act independently and vigorously and in 
co-operation among ourselves and with our teachers and public 
authorities for cleanliness, for health, for good manners, for 
prosperity, for the convenience and beauty of our environment 
and for every good purpose; to establish the habit of practicing 
the Golden Rule in all the affairs of life; and that we may be 
trained in economy and efficiency in the use of time, energy, 
books, tools and materials. 

Article I. 

Section 1. All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested 
in a Congress of the Republic which shall consist of all the 
citizens or of representatives elected by the citizens. 

Sec. 2. The Congress, if composed of elected representatives, 

263 



264 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

shall consist of two representatives from each state, elected at 
large by the citizens of the state and may be known as senators; 
and fifteen representatives, or more if desirable, at least one 
from each state, the remaining number to be apportioned to the 
states in proportion to their number of citizens. The Congress 
may sit as a single house or as two houses; if as two houses, 
appointments by the president shall be confirmed by the Senate. 
There shall be a regular session of the Congress at least once each 
month. 

Sec. 3. The Vice-President of the Republic shall be the 
President of the Congress. 

Sec. 4. The Congress may provide such officers as it may 
find desirable for the transaction of its business. 

Sec. 5. The Congress shall have power to enact laws affecting 
the welfare of the Republic. 

Sec. 6. Every legislative act must be by a resolution or bill. 
Every bill shall begin with the following clause: "Be it enacted 

by the School Republic in Congress assembled, That" 

Sec. 7. All legislative acts shall become effective when ap- 
proved by the President of the Republic and the Superintendent 
of the school. 

Sec. 8. The territory of the Republic extends over the lands 
of the school and the district or reservation in which it is located. 

Article II. 

Section 1 . The executive power shall be vested in a President 
of the Republic, to be elected by a majority of the whole body 
of citizens. He shall hold office during a term of ten weeks or 
until his successor is elected and shall not serve more than two 
terms in succession. 

Sec. 2. The President shall appoint a Secretary of State whose 
appointment shall be subject to confirmation by a majority of 
the Congress, whose duty will be to preserve the records of the 
Republic, and perform such other duties as may be prescribed 
by the Congress. 

Article III. 

Section 1. The judicial power of the Republic shall be vested 
in a Supreme Court, the judges of which shall be appointed 



School Federal Constitution 265 

by the President of the Republic and confirmed by a majority 
of the Congress. 

Sec. 2. The Court shall have two branches, one for the boys 
and one for the girls. 

Sec. 3. The Judges of the Court may appoint such clerks and 
other officers as may be desirable tor the transaction of its 
business. 

Sec. 4. The judicial power shall extend to all cases in law 
and equity, arising under this Constitution and the laws of the 
Republic, and cases arising between states, and between citizens 
of different states, or in which a state and citizens of another 
state become a party, and to all cases not provided for in the 
state and municipal courts. 

Sec 5. Decisions of the Supreme Court shall not become 
effective till signed by the Superintendent of the School. 

Article IV. 

Section 1. Where in this Constitution it is provided that a 
choice may be made between two or more methods, this choice 
shall be made by the Superintendent of the School. 

Sec. 2. Amendments to this Constitution may be made 
whenever two-thirds of the citizens of all the states or two- 
thirds of the states comprising the Republic deem it necessary, 
providing such amendment is approved by the Superintendent 
of the School and the Supervisor of Civic Training. 

Sec. 3. This Constitution shall take effect immediately. 

Date 

President. 

Superintendent. 

Supervisor of Civic Training 



CHAPTER XIII 

CHILDREN'S INTERNATIONAL STATE 

WE shall never reach the time when peace, harmony and 
goodwill prevails throughout the world, till the 
people in every land are trained in their child- 
hood in the active practice of justice, kindness, personal 
independence and co-operation for every good purpose, by 
means of the responsibility of citizenship in the public schools. 
In March, 1908, special commissioners of education from 
several countries in both hemispheres met in New York City, 
and this was their theme through a number of meetings. 
A result of which was that they wrote, and on April 3, 1908, 
signed the following : 

KttitUa of Agmmftti STounottuj 
(Ulje (EljUorot'o ^International 0tai*. 

We, the undersigned, especially interested in helping all 
children to develop noble and strong character, by means of 
child citizenship and government of the children, by the 
children and for the children, under instruction of their 
teachers, by the School Republic system, and conceiving 
the idea that if the child governments in our several countries 
should be united in one world-wide government, we should 
in some measure be able to stimulate interest in local and 
national government, develop international intercourse and 
friendship and advance the cause of peace on Earth and good 
will among men; we hereby institute such a government, to 
be known as "The Children's International State," based 
on the practice of the Golden Rule in all private, public and 
international affairs. 

All children may become citizens who will sign the fol- 
lowing declaration: 

266 



Children's International State 267 

3»»?E. % Nrtu GlUiztiiB, BuUaera of the World of ©mnarrnw, 
**^ wish to have our world at peace. We wish for all 
people, health, happiness and intelligence; good man- 
ners, good morals and good fortune. We join hands from 
land to land and promise to do our best to serve the world, 
each in our own village, town, or city, each in our own dear 
country, and all together in the Children's International State. 



Our flag is a white disk, emblematic of a clean, healthy and 
united world, in the center of a sky blue field in the propor- 
tion of a disk three feet in diameter and a field four feet wide 
and six long. 

It is agreed that the chief executive officer of the Children's 
International State in each country shall try to secure the 
co-operation of his government and such other provision 
for the advancement of this cause in his country as he may 
find possible. 

It is further agreed that until other arrangements can be 
made, Wilson L. Gill, the originator of the School City or 
Republic, and joint founder of this Children's International 
State, shall be its president, and that he is hereby empowered 
to appoint such secretaries and other officers as he may find 
circumstances require, and that the chief representative of 
the said State in each country shall be a vice-president of 
the said State, and that our vice-presidents pro tempore 
are for the Argentine Republic, Mr. Ernesto Nelson, Special 
Commissioner of Education and Director of the National 
Museum of Education; for Japan, Professor Eiji Makiyama, 
Special Commissioner of Education, member of the faculty 
of the Imperial Normal College and principal of the Model 
School; for Sweden, Mr. Peter G. Norberg, Editor and Edu- 
cator. 

Signed in the City of New York, this 3rd day of April 1908. 

Ernesto Nelson, Peter G. Norburg, 

Eiji Makiyama, Wilson L. Gill, 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Helen Campbell, 

Elizabeth P. Bemis, Lyman Beecher Stowe. 



268 A New Citizenship — Appendix 

There were five nations represented in this conference. 
One active member of it, a special commissioner of education 
from an imperial, continental European government, said he 
would be censured if his name were published in this con- 
nection without special instructions from his government. 
For that reason his name is not given. 

This movement will be developed as soon as there is a 
fund to meet clerical and other necessary expenses. 



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■SS&9L2!! CONGRESS 



020 313 194 A 



